Mark Sullivan over at Light Reading has posted an article with an interesting look into Microsoft TV’s Usability Lab and some interesting findings related to the IPTV User Experience…

According to Microsoft TV usability director David Sloo, the reaction time of other IPTV features, such as programming guides, can appear to be faster than they really are if a viewer is experiencing highly reactive channel change response times…So Sloo’s team doesn’t just study responses to the Microsoft TV product: A lot of time is spent learning from both the attributes and shortcomings of competing products…The research has shown that TV watchers want to spend most of their time looking at their TV, not at their remote. So Sloo and his team have been working with several different ways of putting more navigation features on the screen, and fewer on the remote control.

“We see TV today as akin to the PC in the 1980s — it’s useful but its utility is limited until it becomes a two-way system,” says Microsoft TV spokesman Jim Brady. Microsoft’s approach to the problem is something called “search and discovery.” During Light Reading’s visit to Microsoft’s Mountain View, Calif. campus, marketing general manager Christine Heckart demonstrated the system’s simple search function. She entered some keywords into the system with the remote control, and the system searched all of the recorded, broadcast and VOD programming available and returned a list of titles.

In future iterations of its software, the “discovery” part of the equation will become more emphasized, Microsoft says, with the experience become more like browsing at Amazon. Once a viewer locates something (a movie, clip or TV show) that’s in their general area of interest, the system begins suggesting related titles the viewer might like

“We get asked about broadband video a lot, and there’s so much confusion about it,” Brady says. “Over time the lines between IPTV and internet video will blur, but today people access and watch them for different reasons,” he adds, though “we do see a crossover in the future.”

via Light Reading by Mark Sullivan, Reporter