Active Exploration of Online Movie Databases by Visual Navigation

Abstract

Typical interfaces of state-of-the-art online movie streaming services are designed to give users a pleasant and visually appealing browsing experience. However, they lack user engagement and encouragement of active exploration because little movie information is presented. In contrast, common movie information archive interfaces provide a lot of information that can be used to actively explore the database’s content. Yet, they are not visually appealing or easy to use due to their text-based design. In this paper, we introduce the concept of visual navigation, which combines the advantages of both of these interfaces, that is, ease of browsing and information richness. Our solution presents movie information visually and in this way encourages users to navigate the database by selecting the information that they find most interesting. In this research, we implemented the visual navigation concept and compared it to a state-of-the-art alternative. Using a qualitative approach, we showed that participants experienced more intrinsic motivation to use the visual navigation implementation than the state-of-the-art alternative and find it more useful as well. By analyzing their usage logs, we discovered that participants more often used movie information to navigate the database and in this way explored the archive more actively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our visual navigation concept and indicate that active exploration of movie databases contributes to a more fulfilling browsing experience.