LinkedTV News: designing a second screen companion for web-enriched news broadcasts

LinkedTV (linkedtv.eu) is a European research project that explores how to integrate television content with Web content in meaningful ways through the use of semantic relations for automatically generating links. This report describes the process of design and evaluation of LinkedTV News, a second screen companion for interacting with hyperlinked television in the domain of newscasts. Our primary goal was to obtain knowledge about potential users of LinkedTV’s technology regarding their information needs and an indication of the reception that this technology could have among them. We performed two initial studies: a focus group and a series of interviews with 19 participants. These allowed us to identify our target group, context of use and requirements with which we created the concept of the application. The design of the application was refined through a series of design iterations and a hi-fi prototype was produced. After creating the LinkedTV News prototype, we evaluated it with a task-based study performed with 8 participants of the initial studies who matched the target profile closely. The main characteristics of LinkedTV News are: • It runs on a tablet PC. • It targets users between 25 and 45 years of age; highly-educated; who like to be up to date about the international news; watch news broadcasts regularly; and own a tablet computer or share it with someone in their household. • It proposes the integration of two activities that are related by subject, but currently often take place through different devices and at different times namely, watching TV newscasts and consulting online newspapers and videos. • It allows synchronous as well as asynchronous interaction with the television (interacting with the application while watching TV as well as bookmarking news and postponing their in depth exploration). • It offers two interaction modes represented by two main screens: lean back and lean forward. • The lean back mode presents condensed information related to the objects, places, persons, and events in the news continuously in the form of slides (a paragraph of text illustrated by an image). This mode is automatic and requires no user interaction, although interaction is possible if desired. • The lean forward mode enables in-depth exploration of each news headline in the categories: different sources; opinions of different authors; in-depth articles; timeline; and from the point of view of geo-localized tweets. We showed that LinkedTV News succeeds in fulfilling many of the user needs and requirements identified in the preliminary studies. Overall, there seems to be interest from users in a hypermedia solution for the news that integrates online newspapers and video with television broadcasts. The hi-fi prototype served as a tool for illustrating and sharing a future vision of hyperlinked broadcast news within and outside the LinkedTV project group. We recommend testing the application with a different and larger group of users. If the study proves successful, we recommend considering the production of a service represented by LinkedTV News as a commercial application of the LinkedTV technology.