Controlling your own experience
Today’s email from usability guru Jakob Nielsen has a very interesting aside in it (which is not related to his new column at all):
Readers outside the U.S. can count themselves lucky not to be subjected to NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics. But even NBC is tolerable when watched on a digital video recorder: I set it to start recording every evening at 8 and then I start watching at 9: this gives me an extra hour to analyze eyetracking data and I can use the DVR to skip over commercials and boring events. It’s easily possible to watch 3 hours of NBC broadcast in 2 hours of viewing.
The entire concept of watching a broadcast at the mercy of the producers’ desire to stretch out the good parts across as much time as possible is getting to be obsolete. The experience from using the Web makes people impatient and forms a desire to control your own experience: to get what you want, when you want it. Non-clickable TV provides a sub-standard user experience for events like the Olympics with multiple components, where different people are interested in different things.
When we talk about empowering the user, it doesn’t just apply to the Internet. It’s affecting everything, especially television…with DVR/TiVo, which allows time-shifting (watching a program whenever you want) and will soon offer place-shifting (watching what you’ve recorded wherever you are on the planet (by logging into your home network).