Connecting TV & PC: an in-situ field evaluation of an unified electronic program guide concept

In-situ studies and evaluations are increasingly appreciated and requested by companies and developers. Direct feedback from the users is seen as important source to further improve a system, to make it usable, acceptable and useful to the users in a final stage. In this paper, we report the results from a conducted in-situ field study for a newly developed EPG (Electronic Program Guide) system. One of the main challenges of our research was to find the right methodological set up in order to gather direct and fast user feedback by bringing developers and users together in a real live setting. Thereby, it was important that the users could easily express their first impressions of the system in an engaging way. Based on our previous work, a creative and playful approach was selected and combined with a variation of the walkthrough method. In this paper we provide a description of the methods used, their combinations, and lessons learned throughout the one-week field study involving different stakeholders.