Developing User Interface Guidelines for DVD Menus

Watching DVDs can be a frustrating experience, because DVD menus often miss out on usability and are complex and difficult to navigate through. Similar to the early years of web development, there is a lack of design standards. In this paper, we show the development of user interface guidelines for DVD menus. These guidelines can be used to design and evaluate DVD menus. We built a prototype according to the guidelines, conducted usability tests with the prototype and evaluated other movie DVDs using the guidelines to show the applicability, utility and usability of the guidelines.

Kappel, Karin, Martin Tomitsch, Thomas Koltringer and Thomas Grechenig. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 (2006). Design>User Interface>Multimedia>DVD

Getting the Right Design and the Design Right: Testing Many Is Better Than One  

We present a study comparing usability testing of a single interface versus three functionally equivalent but stylistically distinct designs. We found that when presented with a single design, users give significantly higher ratings and were more reluctant to criticize than when presented with the same design in a group of three. Our results imply that by presenting users with alternative design solutions, subjective ratings are less prone to inflation and give rise to more and stronger criticisms when appropriate. Contrary to our expectations, our results also suggest that usability testing by itself, even when multiple designs are presented, is not an effective vehicle for soliciting constructive suggestions about how to improve the design from end users. It is a means to identify problems, not provide solutions.

Tohidi, Maryam, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker and Abigail Sellen. CHI 2006 Proceedings (2006). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods