Social television enables remote communication and interaction between viewers. Many social TV systems are currently in development. There are existing guidelines for ensuring a usable system however there are no guidelines evaluating the social aspects of a system. The authors propose a set of twelve heuristics for measuring the sociability of these TV applications.
Their heuristics in my own words:
- Offer text and voice communication.
- Have a user status bar with options like busy, away, watching intently, watching relaxed, and not really watching at all just sitting on the couch with the TV on.
- Let people collaborate at the while watching at the same time or if they watch at different times.
- Allow for interactions between people at different TV and also people watching at the same TV.
- Track and use everyone's TV choices and habits
- Let the user change the settings.
- Have privacy options and ensure privacy.
- Don't distract from the actual TV watching.
- Be sure and tell user about changes and upcoming shows or events.
- Recognize the genres of programs and behave appropriately for each genre. Like don't allow for people to spoil the endings of mystery shows but for comedy shows it doesn't really matter.
- Allow for sharing between devices like a PC or smartphone.
- Encourage shared activities.
Thoughts
The heuristics they propose seem like 'duh' to me. I am assuming that these authors are attempting to create a social TV system and one of their first steps to research the design requirements. After they gathered the requirements they thought 'Hey we could publish a paper about these' and that's just what they did. All the heuristics are good ideas in my opinion and I agree that a system that fulfilled them all would be a success.
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