VCR Programming Survey

Christian mogensen@cs.stanford.edu - http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/mogens/377/vcr.html

Background

I am a very experienced VCR programmer. I hacked my first VCR at age 9 and have been setting VCR clocks ever since. I am familiar with both itty-bitty-button interfaces and the newer on-screen fill-in-forms based technologies.

Questions

With comments in italics.

Do you have a VCR?
How long have you had it?
How frequently do you use it?
We need to capture the interviewee's background quickly. It also sets up the interview in a traditional way - it's the "Once upon a time" of interviews. We also find out if the interview is worth pursuing, since people who don't have VCRs can go directly to question 5 (the hypothetical).
Have you ever programmed a VCR to record a program later?
If so:
How frequently do you program the VCR?
How do you program it - describe the interface?
If not:
Why do you not use this function?
We need to capture the relative rates of use and programming. i.e. do they use the VCR only for watching movies from Blockbuster or do they use the VCR only to watch stuff they record from TV?
If they do program it, their description of the steps they remember should indicate the type of interface and how much they have to think about it when using it.
If they do not program the VCR we have to find out why they do not. Is the interface too clumsy, or is there no need to record shows, or is there nothing worth recording?
Have you ever recorded the wrong program by mistake or not recorded at all?
Why do you think that happened?
This question only applies if they answered yes above. This question is a nod to the critical incident method. If they don't remember anything then it couldn't have been that critical.
What is the most annoying thing about your VCR?
Another critical incident type question - since we can't do field observations, we have to rely on people's opinions.
In ideal world, what would you VCR do?
People should have a chance to wish for things. This question can be stretched out by additional prompting if the interview is running short.

Interviews

The interview was administered the following ways:

One e-mail survey - the questions were mailed to the subject, and responses were received by e-mail. Subject was female, had a VCR for a long time but did not use the record function often.
One interview conducted without a recording device and notes taken after the interview concluded. Subject was female, had had VCR for a week (then it broke). Had not used recording function, but had read manuals.
Three interviews recorded on microcassette. Subjects were always asked for permission and the recorder placed in plain view. Subjects were all male, had varied frequencies of use (one did not have a VCR, one had had a VCR for a year and another for three months).

The interviews actually took 3 minutes to 5 minutes to administer. In hindsight I could probably have put another free-form question in the list.

People who had used a VCR tended to give much more narrow answers to the free-form questions. The more frequently they used the VCR, them more detailed descriptions of their VCR would be.

On screen programming, so the first thing you do is hit the program button on the remote, which is the easiest way to go about it . and then you dial in the program you want to set, starts off with date, and then let's see start time, the end time and then channel, and then the speed you want to record at. When you're done with that you hit program to end. If you have want to enter another program then you, um, dial in another program, and then Program Program to end.

People who were heavy VCR users tended to focus on incremental improvements to the technology, like better VCRs and so on.

You could put it on the net so I could program it from my office.

The outlandish and imaginative ideas came from less frequent users. (Of course, the sample is much too small to generalize from.)

I found myself prompting for more information and rephrasing questions quite a bit. Since the interview is out of the blue, the subject hasn't formed a clear opinion on VCRs at the start of the interview. Few people think about their VCR except when it isn't working, so soliciting ideas and opinions out of the blue is a bit disconcerting. Next time, I would consider starting with a half minute of quiet reflection about the topic to get the subject in the right frame of mind.

Experience from Interviews

People will relax and quickly ignore the recorder if you show it to them before the interview starts and explain why you are using it. I conducted two interviews as a pair - two subjects interviewed one after the other with the free-form questions as an open form of debate.

A: Something like TV Guide on the screen, and I could just highlight the show I wanted tape.
B: Like a TV Guide with GREP attached.?

then later:

A VCR that you tell it a broad range of shows that you want, like all science fiction shows.

The free form answers quickly got very interesting and quite "out there". I found it very easy to get sucked into the impromptu brainstorming session. The great thing was that the recording device completely disappeared once the three-way conversation started and the ideas started flying.

The e-mail interview served up a few interesting points:

Spell and grammar check the questions first.
Try them out on a sheet of paper to make sure all the questions are comprehensible.
Keep it short. People don't like stuffed e-mail boxes.

The field notes captured the key points as I heard them, but very probably I forgot a few points along the way. I also have no way of going back to check without reasking the questions, which may yield different answers this time. Taking notes tends to slow the interview down, since the subject waits for the interviewer to finish notetaking before continuing an answer. However, the field notes are easier to refer to - you can scan them visually, plus the first-order filtering has already been done during the writeup.

Report on Results

The VCR suffers from a lack of prominence in peoples lives. People aren't very familiar with the VCR when they need its advanced functions. This quote is from an infrequent recorder of programs:

Well, I get the remote control out if I can find it, and hit this tiny button which I can never remember which it is. Then a menu comes up on screen and from there it's easy for a while: I enter channel, time range, and date. Then I have to hit that little button again, and I always wonder if it has really saved the stuff. Also, I think the machine has to be on and not in use at the time of the recording. I mean, it can be being used as a tuner, but not, obviously, as a recorder.

People prefer the new on-screen menu type of interface that you can control with the remote. It is vital that the machine gives clear and visible feedback about its state to the user. This also from another comment about how hard it is to see the VCR display panel from the sofa. The old press-tiny-buttons-on-the-VCR style is despised (with good reason). Don Norman's principles should be followed in VCR designs too.

This applies to feedback on what you are about to tape as well as when you are going to record. If the recorder could map the time back to the name of the show the user would have a nice form of feedback useful for correcting errors.

I set the timer to record Saturday morning cartoons at 7 pm instead of 7 am.

Of course, if the VCR knew when shows were going to be on, you could just say "Tape Star-Trek" and it would be able to schedule the various shows automatically for you. Then we could extend this to the VCR making the decision about what you want to watch. Tracking all the things that appear on TV these days is a full-time job.

Gee...I wish my vcr would recommend cool programs based on what I watch, and sometimes tape something for me and play it when I'm bitching about what's on. I wish it would have a live connection to the preview channel and be intelligent about flipping only to things I might want to watch at the moment -- totally filter out the home shopping network and any bizarre foreign language soaps.

Another problem was too many functions on modern VCRs. The instruction manual is too thick complains one, There are too many functions. Another interviewee said simply:

All I need is PLAY and RECORD and that's it.

VCRs break too easily. Half of the subjects (three of the five) have had problems with their VCRs in the past few months. In one case it was still at the repair shop after three months.

So in summary:

The on screen menu interfaces are preferred, but they need to give good feedback about what is being stored in memory.
The screen menu must be readable from a distance.
The interface must be simple - a few general functions are preferred to many highly specific ones. It should be self explanatory.
The VCR should know when shows are on, so that you don't have to. In fact, it may even pick shows for you.
The VCR must be robust.

Rationale

"Kill your darlings" -- advice on how to give a presentation.

The problem is having too many good quotes. The trick is to get rid of nice quotes which do not add content. My basic guideline is one quote per point. One quote being three to five lines long. Mixing long and short quotes breaks the rhythm of the text, and makes (hopefully) for more interesting reading.

A long quote is like a short story, so I aim to pick interesting stories which have humor or fun ideas. Long quotes also give context to the key point you are trying to illustrate and give you a mini case-study for free.

The quotes are intended to illustrate the point being made, not to carry it by themselves.

Proposal for Further Study

Survey VCR users on likes and dislikes, their ideal VCRs. (20-30 subjects)
Observe VCR use natural settings. Find out how they really use the VCR. (3-5 samples)
Filter ideas and synthesize new prototype designs. (3-5 designers)
Run user tests on prototypes in lab. (3-5 users)

Survey VCR Users

Before we can start an ethnographic study it is worth looking at what users think and want. i.e. we need to be able to frame the right questions before starting closer observations. A simple set of questions like the one used here should give us a good starting point.

Asking for blue sky thinking also helps seed the brainstorming pot, because people tend to be ignorant of the current technical limitations.

Three to five researchers would spend a week doing interviews of 20-25 people and then spend another few weeks doing analysis and synthesis on the collected data. The trick would be to get enough varied opinion without suffering from excessive sampling.

Observe VCR Use

VCR users lie. They don't know what they are doing. This leads to an interesting social study. The best plan would be to locate a researcher or camera in a home to observe video use. The researchers et a few relaxing days in Joe Sixpack's home as a guest, Joe gets compensation (a new VCR?) and the project gains lots of data on actual VCR use in context.

Three to five observations are needed. This could easily take a month to set up and execute.

This is also a chance for everyone to play ethnographer (if you want to be cheap). Observe yourself and record everything involving the VCR. Of course, this limits the population under observation to something like "researchers working for a large VCR company" which isn't very representative of the population at large.

Different kinds of families need to be observed: families with teens, college students, singles, the elderly. All may have different patterns of use and different needs.

Synthesize new prototypes

Having seen what VCRs are subjected to in the world outside the lab, the chastened researchers can now come up with new and interesting solutions. The wish list of features should also provide a few inspired ideas. A team of three to five researchers can spend a few months working on the prototypes, depending on how advanced and blue-sky the underlying ideas are.

Run user test

Check out the prototypes with a genuine user and see what happens. This leads to prototype revisions and so we go back and forth between testing and revising the prototypes. Running user tests isn't as nice as putting the prototype into a home and letting the new pattern of use (praxis) evolve, but the basic need here is turn-around speed. The prototypes need to be patched and tweaked, and may not work without much handholding, which precludes any on-site testing.

User test can take from a few weeks to a few months depending on how well the initial prototype turns out.

Is it worth doing?

Yes - the results should be generalizable to many other appliances. Programmable machines are appearing everywhere, and there are many examples of poor interfaces out there. We program alarm clocks, microwave ovens, VCRs, voice-mail systems, phones and CD players. They all have different dumb interfaces.

If this study can improve them it is worth doing.