Assessing the User Experience of Visual Navigation

Abstract

Many people have access to large amounts of digital movie data. In order to maintain overview over the data, a proper way of browsing is important. Furthermore, the amount of data complicates the search for something to watch, and might lead to a choice overload. Common movie browsing approaches to solve these problems exist. We refer to them as 'List-style Browsing' and 'Visual Browsing'. The former allows users to browse sorted lists of mostly textual data, representing movie data. Visual Browsing, still allows users to browse a sorted list of movie data, albeit more visually appealing. However, these browsing techniques limit the user when they are unsure of what to watch. Therefore, we introduce a new concept called Visual Navigation. Visual Navigation enables users to navigate the movie database, by using visual elements from the data. In this work, an initial version of Visual Navigation is implemented and evaluated, where actors' faces on movie posters are used as navigation points to navigate between movies that feature them. Two experiments have been conducted to find the influence of Visual Navigation on the users' emotional state and to determine if user experience increases over Visual Browsing. Results show limited effect on the emotional state of the users from Visual Navigation. However, users do become more positively affected on average as a formal analysis using the PANAS framework showed. Qualitative feedback obtained via an informal interview and a standard questionnaire suggests that Visual Navigation leads to an improved user experience compared to Visual Browsing.