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Sean Blott comes home after school and he wants to watch relax by watching some of his favorite professional Starcraft gamers. He navigates to streambrowser.com and he finds his recently viewed streams to find his favorite channels. He sees that none are on-air and he wants to view a live stream. He recalls the name of some professional gamer that his friend told him about called PengUser so he does a search for it. The search shows that PengUser's stream is offline. Then Sean simply browses through video-game related streams and finds a live one that looks interesting, and watches it.
Designs
Design 1
Design 1 is based off of a standard tab navigation interface with stream channels represented by thumbnails in a grid.
Storyboard
Analysis
* Learnability: StreamBrowser (SB) is generally easy to learn because of its standard navigation layout with tabs at the top. SB is also only divided into three main sections, so it's very easy to remember and be familiar with the interface. However the popup overlay may not be too intuitive, but easy to remember and retain for future uses of SB.
* Visibility: The different states of the interface is designated by highlighting and other visual signs. A certain tab will be "open" if that page is open, and a catergory item will be underlined and highlighted if that is what the user has selected. The visibility of the clickability of the thumbnails is lacking however. The overlay's visibility is improved by the "dimming" of the background.
* Efficiency: Having only thumbnails allows more streams to fit on a page, and picture recognition may be better than verbal recognition once the user becomes familiar with the thumbnails. However, if the user is not familiar, then the extra time needed to hover over thumbnails to get infocards would be a minus for efficiency. Also, the filmstrip idea is alright if the user is just browsing, but if there is a thing he saw early on that he wants to go back to, the filmstrip could be inefficient because it's like scrolling a scrollbar with the up/down buttons only.
* Errors: Errors are easily recovered from. There won't be any mode errors since there aren't different modes of operation. If the user clicks the wrong stream, all he has to do is go back on his browser. Similarly, other operations like searching and selecting a category are reversible by simply choosing the right thing after an error.
Design 2
This design uses an accordion to expand the relevant sections and shrink the others, but still leaving the other sections visible.
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