Digital Media Buzz > Study Seeks to Revolutionize User Experience

Study Seeks to Revolutionize User Experience

By Sheila Shayon

We are a society increasingly immersed in interactive digital media. The implications of this for design and development of interactive interfaces are far reaching and far from fully understood.

Professor S. Shyam Sundar has recently received a $432,313 National Science Foundation grant to undertake a quantifiable study of this timely issue, to be conducted over a two-year period and involve graduate and undergraduate students in the Penn State College of Communications.

“Interactivity has become ubiquitous in the digital media landscape. Numerous interactive tools are designed, tested, deployed and evaluated. Yet, we do not have generalizable knowledge about the larger concept of interactivity and its psychological impact on user experience,” Sundar says.

Specifically, the Penn State project will test and examine how all this interactivity affects those who are consuming massive amounts of interactive media. Interactivity at the base level is defined as two-way exchange, immediate and in real time. “A whole new science is emerging to address people’s interaction with digital artifacts,” Sundar adds.

While things such as chat functions on social-networking sites, customization options for Web portals and scrollbars in mobile texting devices regularly get hailed as advances, the researchers hope to find out whether the interactive options really lead to richer user engagement with the medium and its contents.

Three specifics of communication will be addressed in the Penn State study: source, medium and message. 1,200 subjects will be interviewed and tested, making it the largest data collection on digital media interactivity to date.

The research will be content-agnostic, focusing on interface interactivity.

Interactivity as a source:
The traditional model is a sender and a receiver. Web 2.0 dramatically changed the rules of engagement, enabling an individual as receiver to also become a source. An example is Amazon, where customer reviews and recommendations become sources of authority – generated by users.

The ability to customize information received online, and further self-tailor that content, makes the user also the source. It becomes an ego-centric construct of the world – an individual is now selecting the news, video, entertainment and information received – becoming the gatekeeper. The ramifications of this are two-sided.

Interactivity as a medium:
Modality Interactivity refers to interface tools that afford users greater activity and broader and richer mental representation of media content. Several senses operating simultaneously creates a multimedia experience.

Hyperlinks, dragging or scrolling a cursor, using mouse-overs, all are affordances that enable functional interactivity, and user engagement with multiple modalities – making a more interactive experience. For example, the mouse-over function of a “price area map” of hotels on Priceline.com. After placing the cursor on a particular area, the location name and links to additional information are shown.

Interactivity as a message:
When media content is a direct function of a user’s previous actions, as in a threaded exchange of messages in a chat forum, interactivity is defined as a message feature – such as hyperlinks and buttons embedded in website content.

User-initiated decisions about where to start, what to ignore and when to stop, create idiosyncratic browsing paths with interlinked messages by navigating through various interface layers. Thus the user is interacting with the message.

Amazon’s FAQ webpage, provides question lists and topic categories; online customer service; email; and simple ‘call me’ functions. When a user clicks the ‘call me’ button and enters his or her phone number, an Amazon.com CSR actually makes a phone call and contacts that person to address his or her issues in real time.

The implications of garnering this kind of quantifiable data and applying it to digital advertising is exponential. It’s all about “Attitude Toward the Ad,” (AAd). For example, a first fix needed is how to combat ‘Banner Blindness,’ as it becomes increasingly clear that savvy users ignore traditional banner ads completely — and skip over them as quickly as possible.

Television advertising is a $67 billion dollar industry. Online video has reached the $700 million dollar mark, a percentage shift that underscores the enormous upside potential for digital media advertising.

Tremor Media, www.tremormedia.com, an online video ad network whose tagline is: “Video the Way You Want It,” offers in-banner and in-stream publisher formats. Tremor’s Acudeo, a proprietary platform is the next generation for video monetization. “Since pricing models are performance driven and advertisers pay only when there’s click-through engagement, brands want scale and efficiency,” says Shane Steele, Tremor’s VP, marketing.

The future is now for online video ads. Fortune 500 brand advertisers are significantly increasing their budgets, paying real attention to the online medium, thus signaling online video’s aggressive climb over the next five years to the highest spot on the media mix food chain.

“But – there’s way too much focus on just click-through ,which is an outdated model,” Steele says. “What matters most is — is the needle moving for those advertisers, and the brand health metrics – which is sales.”

Hand-in-hand with click through and sales metrics challenges is growing frustration from creatives who feel constrained by a 50-year-old television model. “Tremor is focused on the entire value chain for advertisers, publishers and consumers,” Steele adds.

The NSF-funded research project at Penn State, according to Sundar, “will likely spawn a new wave of theoretically driven interactivity research that will feed directly into design of interfaces for a variety of purposes, from learning systems to serious games.”

And so – the penultimate analog phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan in his most widely known book,  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964, “the medium is the message,” is evolving in the brave new digital world.

“Multimedia is a misnomer,” Sundar says. “it’s really multiple modalities in one medium.”