Wednesday October 8th, 2008 by Björn Balazs

The Icon Usability Test of the TV-Browser icons has been closed for some time now. We have been busy learning from that study and working on further improvements for the icon test. So I totally forgot to write about the actual results…

Just as a reminder – the aim of the study was twofold:

First, we wanted to prove the method, which worked very well and we are going to publish the results in some scientific magazine sometime.

The second goal was to reveal the good and the not so good icons in TV-Browser. For the test we used some icons that are visible in TV-Browser and the tool-tips provided for them. We then asked the user of TV-Browser (they should be used to the icons!) to attend the survey – and they did indeed! A great “Thank you” to all of you who have participated!

And these are the results in short:

The following icons proved to be just great and really helpful for the user:

Print,

Reminder Function,

Favorite program,

Search,

Filter

A second set of icons worked alright, but has the potential to be improved:

List of currently running programs,

Simple marker plug in

And finally some icons showed the definite necessity for an improvement:

Start external Program,

Tool for translators,

 Get recent TV listings,

 Rate program

Now we are working on an second study, in which we will test alternative icons for those last functions. In this study we are going to present alternative icons to the users, which then have to pick the icons that fit best for he function. At last we are going to test the new set of icons to prove the improvement, that we hopefully will have achieved by then!

Next to TV-Browser, we are also working on a study for the testing of Tine 2.0 icons. Hopefully I will be back to you with some news on that issues soon!