Project Duration : 16May'14- 15 July'14
Project Overview : The project is to determine the elements\conditions that affect the usability of InFlight Entertainment screens and provide guidelines that can help build an efficient GUI for these screens.
Project Overview : The project is to determine the elements\conditions that affect the usability of InFlight Entertainment screens and provide guidelines that can help build an efficient GUI for these screens.
Guide : Mrs. Bharti Morey, Manager GUI team, Western Outdoor Interactive
Literature Review
What is In-flight Entertainment System ?
In-flight entertainment equipment is often touch screen sensitive, allowing interaction between
each seat on the aircraft and the flight attendants, which are wireless in some systems. In-
flight entertainment (IFE) refers to the entertainment available to aircraft passengers during a
flight.Various varieties of in-flight entertainment are Audio entertainment, Encoding standards,
Video entertainment, Closed-captioning like In-flight movies and Personal televisions, In-flight
games, Moving-map systems, Islamic prayers and directions to Mecca, In-flight connectivity like
Satellite and internal telephony, Data communication, Wi-Fi and Mobile phone.
How should the interface be?
The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient
as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals—what is often called user-centered
design.Usability inspection is basically letting an evaluator inspect a user interface. This is
generally considered to be cheaper to implement than usability testing, and can be used early on
in the development process since it can be used to evaluate prototypes or specifications for the
system, which usually cannot be tested on users.
as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals—what is often called user-centered
design.Usability inspection is basically letting an evaluator inspect a user interface. This is
generally considered to be cheaper to implement than usability testing, and can be used early on
in the development process since it can be used to evaluate prototypes or specifications for the
system, which usually cannot be tested on users.
User Research
looked at various interactives that the company offered me with all the type of systems available in the testing lab. I tried evaluating them from user point of view as i was always new to these systems and tried evaluating through interviews and blogs of people.
I learnt about the user group which varied from airlines company to company. I learnt about their needs from the system and their environmental and educational background which would help me further in the evaluation.
Design Methodology
HOW IS USABILITY EVALUATION DONE IN COMPANIES?
User testing - No
Usability Engineer - No
Heuristics Evaluation - Yes
I worked out with all possible ways of usability evaluation in a company and heuristic evaluation came out to be the most eficient way.
Now Heuristic Evaluation can be done on the basis of Jakob Neilsen's Heuristic, the first person who developed it and also some other like Gerhardt- Paoals Cognitive Engineering Princilples or Weinschenk and Barker Classification.
But making it these guidelines easy to use i decided, with the guidance of my mentor to use Neilsen's Heuristics.
Experiment Designing
Now after deciding the methods, i decided to work with various interactives available in the company and also asked some other people to use it and recorded their problems with the interctive and also their choices according to the age group.Now i defined usability again in terms of Infligh Entertainment Interactive.
Forming Guidelines
After Defining usability now i wrote various issues with the interactive at one place and divided them into 4 categories. Four pillars of interactives are Navigation, Content, Presentation and Interaction. After dividing i tried forming solutions for it indicating which heuristic this issue violated and how can you rectify it.
We talked about various flaws like positioning and importance of back button, concept of overlays and light boxes and how often should they be used, order of options depend on their usability etc.
Due to the Non disclosure agreement with the agreement i can not display the screens here.
Hope you got a brief overview of the proect.
