MovieWall: A Novel Interface Concept for Visual Exploration of Large Movie Collections

Abstract

Streaming online video content, including movies, has become extremely popular. To assist users with choosing a movie, interfaces of state-of-the-art movie streaming services generally present the user with a limited number of options selected by their recommendation systems. This allows the user to make a choice without spending too much time or effort. However, with this approach they generally lack a convenient way to explore the entire collection, without going in a very specific direction. If a user simply wants to look around, without a specific goal in mind, current interfaces do not facilitate this very well. To complement state-of-the-art movie browsing interface, we present the interface concept we call the MovieWall. It facilitates the exploratory and engaging exploration of large movie collections on mobile touch-based devices. The interface essentially consists of a large grid of movie posters, controlled by standard touch gestures. In this thesis, we verified the potential, feasibility and usefulness of this concept through a pilot study and a consecutive, more elaborated user study. The result showed that users were able to handle this new concept, and were comfortable with browsing relatively small images and with a lot of content on their screen at once. The subjective feedback was primarily positive. Besides testing the usefulness of the interface concept, we also compared different arrangements of the movies in the wall: randomly distributed and (semi-)clustered. Most users prefer the movies in the wall being clustered rather than randomly distributed, but that a random arrangement did not perform significantly worse in terms of user experience or satisfaction of movies encountered. Finally, we present a demo interface, improved according to the findings in the two user studies.