HIERARCHICAL VIDEO BROWSING INTERFACES ON TOUCH-SCREEN MOBILE DEVICES

Abstract

The most widely spread model used in hierarchical video browsing interfaces is the storyboard model, where frames extracted from movies are shown on the screen in an orderly fashion based on the timeline of the film. This research paper evaluates different characteristics of this type of interfaces on mobile devices with touchscreens via a series of detailed user studies. Based on the results and observations from the studies, we propose and implement a new interface design. The usability of this new interface is proven in a final user study.

The results of our experiments show that users prefer simpler methods of interactions in browsing interfaces, even though they are not more efficient or flexible than interfaces using more complex gestures. It was also observed that browsing interfaces focused on a single level of the granularity hierarchy, tends to do better in terms of the number of mistakes and worse in search time than interfaces that show multiple levels on the screen at the same time. Even though the results of the user studies were not all conclusive, they still offer a good basis for the implementation of a combined interface with statistically better results than a simple multi-level browser.