Usability's New Mantra:
Keep it Simple

by Ken Freed.
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To keep everyone happy, cable must help subscribers get cozy with new technologies.
 

Wile a growing number of households are subscribing to digital cable service in the U.S., some customers are not happy with the service and soon return to analog cable. Why? The technology feels too difficult to master, and people simply give up trying.

What's often creating churn for MSOs is that digital cable's interface really isn't all that user friendly, at least, not yet.

"I believe 'ease of use' is a laudable goal and should be a rallying cry for the industry," said Ross Rubin, formerly the senior research officer at Jupiter Communications and now a senior analyst at eMarketer. "There has been slow progress in making systems easy to use, and this has slowed market penetration."

"We now have 14 million households using the PowerTV system for digital cable," said Bindu Crandall, the director of marketing for Scientific-Atlanta. "As we improve the usability of the interface, like not overloading a button with too many functions, we expect the result will be converting most of our analog customers into digital customers."

Advanced cable services can't reach their full market potential unless consumers feel comfortable using those services. And that comfort largely depends in the usability of the interface, from the remote control to the onscreen guide and beyond.

INTERFACE DESIGN

Indeed, a loose cable industry consensus long relegated interface design to each set-top box and middleware provider. Many industry players feared that premature standardization could lock cable into dead-end solutions, so the tacit agreement was to let marketplace competition set the standards for the cable TV interface, much as Windows became the standard for the personal computer through market dominance.

But competition led to repeated interoperability problems among middleware vendors. A crucial case was Motorola's delay producing its advanced DCT5000 series digital box. After the vendor spent years unsuccessfully trying to squeeze the middleware from both Liberate Technologies and MicrosoftTV into that box for TCI and then AT&T Broadband, the cable operator finally canceled the order before selling out to Comcast Corp.

Plagued by delays rolling out advanced services, the cable industry finally agreed in 1997 to work through CableLabs to develop the Open Cable Applications Platform (OCAP) as the standard middleware for all digital boxes sold at retail in the U.S. to meet a federal mandate.

By late 2002, this effort led to the plug-and-play agreement between the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the Consumer Electronics Association. The TV receiver manufacturers agreed to install the chipset and software for one-way digital cable services. These new cable-ready TV sets will work anywhere in the U.S., but the receivers won't support two-way cable services like video-on-demand, which will still require a set-top box.

To ensure compatibility between the boxes sold at retail and those that cable operators directly lease to subscribers, OCAP is being implemented by all digital cable box vendors selling in the U.S., including Motorola, Scientific-Atlanta, Pace Micro Technology, Panasonic (Matsushita), and Pioneer Electronics. The move is expected to improve the overall usability of advanced cable services.

OCAP middleware includes a standardized application interface (API) for all of the proprietary digital programming services delivered by the box, including the interactive or electronic program guide (IPG or EPG); information-on-demand services like news and weather; VOD; and games, home banking, home shopping, Internet access, and other interactive TV services.

PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION

Progress is being made on the usability front, but obstacles remain.

For example, TV Guide rigorously defends its Gemstar patents for the onscreen TV schedule layout, and some operators like Comcast and Motorola have adopted the company's IPG. But not everyone is willing to be compliant.

Scientific-Atlanta, which supplies equipment for Time Warner Cable, recently prevailed against TV Guide in two patent-infringement suits over its grid-style program guide. Canal+, conversely, developed a different plan for its MediaGuide IPG, which offers video feeds from channels in an onscreen block matrix. Such variations may solve legal problems, but are they more usable?

"The 500-channel universe is changing the way we use TV," says Dr. Diana Gagnon Hawkins, an independent consultant in Redwood City, CA, specializing in interface design for advanced TV systems. "Back when cable had only 30 to 60 channels, it was easy to scroll though a channel guide. But that user paradigm broke down when hundreds of channels were added. Consumers do not want to wait while scrolling through 200 or more channels."

Hawkins notes that in her household, "My kids might be watching Nickelodeon with a channel number at 500 something, but I may want to watch CNN at channel 50. I'm not willing to scroll from 500 down to 50 to select my program, and we enjoy channels spread all over the place. Setting up the favorite channels inside the guide is so complicated that we end up memorizing the channel numbers we like, instead, and that's not the way people want to watch TV."

Mark Hess, the VP of digital television at Comcast, admits that "ever since we launched VOD, we've been aware that we confused our customers by adding so much new content. The original EPG for digital TV was good for up to 200 channels, but now we're pushing past 300 channels with thousands of hours of content."

Hess says that today's TV Guide IPG is a work in progress.

"We're working internally on the features we require and we'll share this with the provider," he says, declining to set a deadline. "Then, we'll test these changes in front of our customers."

 

He continues: "There's still a lot of work to be done together, and a lot of decisions to be made before everything comes together. What maters is that all of us making decisions -- programmers, manufacturers and cable operators -- must agree to deliver services and products that are deadly simple for customers to use. This is critical."

USABILITY STUDIES

One key to success is the fact that subscribers "want to find and manipulate content instantly," notes Tim Friezley, the VP of global solutions at MicrosoftTV, which offers a software platform for digital cable as an adjunct to its worldwide PC business.

To discover what works, Microsoft in the past year conducted a 30-city usability study with subjects who spent one to four hours a week programming a TiVo personal digital video recorder (PVR or DVR).

"We saw that the guide was clumsy for many users, who found it hard to find the content they wanted in the broadcast mode," Friezley reports. "And when they switched to the PVR's on-demand mode, the difference between the two interfaces was confusing. Out of 90 features on TiVo we tested, we found that most consumer could master only three to five of them before they just gave up trying."

At Scientific-Atlanta, engineers and usability experts are spending "a lot of time and research energy to design a very simple interface for average cable subscribers," says Dave Davies, the company's director of strategies and business development.

He notes that the vendor is combining engineering with marketing elements in a series of focus groups and field tests to create the best possible navigation system for S-A boxes running PowerTV systems.

"Our goal is to reduce the number of clicks needed to navigate the screens for selecting content by time or category," Davies says. "The challenge is cutting the number of different interfaces that subscribers have to deal with on a daily basis.

"For instance, a cable operator may deploy an IPG from us, but VOD from another vendor. We need to offer a more integrated experience so [that] subscribers who feel comfortable with one pay service are not afraid of trying another."

A MATTER OF STYLE

To that end, Davies says Scientific-Atlanta publishes a "style guide" for PowerTV and third-party developers with recommendations for the onscreen "look and feel," as well as how each button on the S-A remote was designed to work. The vendor offers to test any new application or product to ensure its style guide extends across all the interfaces without conflicts.

However, S-A doesn't demand compliance with the style guide nor require formal certification.

"We want to leave the flexibility for a developer to do something different and better," Davies explains. If an application interface is too different, it may confuse consumers, he admits, "but that's why we're working together with cable operators. It's in their best interest to pick the most usable solutions for their customers."

Hawkins' solution? Cable should adopt software that allows the set-top box to adapt to subscribers' viewing habits, and generate personalized virtual channels based on viewers' habits and preferences, along the lines of what's possible with a PVR.

For consumers to fully accept that, though, "rigid privacy protections must be in place so personal viewing filters or profiles never leave the box," Hawkins notes. "Cable customers do not want cable operators knowing what they watch.".

"If there's a problem with the ease of use on any system," says Dr. Clare-Marie Karat, a human-machine interface researcher at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY, "the real problem is with the system, not the user. You should hear all the horror stories I've heard about products that just don't do what they're supposed to do, and then how customers are made to feel stupid when they call the companies to complain."

In a 10-point Computer User's Bill of Rights first published in 1998, Karat began with an idea that the cable industry might take to heart: "The user is always right." .

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TRANSMIT

First published December 2003 in premier of Transmit (c) 2003 by Ken Freed

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