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StreamBrowser is implemented mostly in javascript with some php. Everything is implemented in one page, and different things are ajaxed in and out based on the request that is sent. Finding the streams are done by making calls to third party sources (currently , only justin.tv api). The viewing history is stored as a cookie on the user's browser. This allows the history to work without having to go through a login system, but on the other hand if a user has multiple computers then the viewing history will not go with them. Since users usually don't want to make new accounts for small features, we feel this is a good tradeoff. It would still be possible to implement a login system later.
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This is StreamBrowser, a site designed to help you find and browse live internet streams. Channels Streams are grouped by categories and are searchable. We want to emulate the experience of TV channel browsing for internet streaming. Streams on StreamBrowser are provided by Justin.tv.
User Tasks
- Please find and watch any stream you want.
- Please find and watch a stream in under the Strategy Games category.
- Please find and watch watch Artosis's stream (or another specific stream if Artosis was offline).
- Please go back to the first stream that you watched.
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Some users were confused that the stream video did not automatically start playing when reaching the page (one person took a full minute trying to find the play button on the embedded video player). We should try to make the stream video start playing immediately after loading, but this may be a restriction of the stream provider itself on the embedding of their player on third party sites (for example, embedded Youtube videos do not autoplay).
On some slower computers, our interface suffered a few bugs is display the css and js elements correctly. One bug was that there a noticeable delay between the end of the loading animation and the thumbnail display of results, such that the results page looks blank and empty for 1-3 seconds. This caused one user to click away from the results page while the browser was trying to load the data. Another rare bug was that the grid layout of video thumbnails freeze up and none of the results are clickable. The user who encountered this just had to refresh the page.
The last usability problem lies in the fundamental design choice to group stream by categories. Categories are at times limiting and restrictive. One user was not sure how to navigate to a particular stream because she did not know enough about the stream to narrow it down by categories (and did not see or choose to use the search box). Categories seem good for mindless perusing, but inefficient to finding specific streams. We also need to find a balance on how many categories and subcategories to display. Too many can overwhelm users; too few doesn't give the users enough information. We currently err on the side of too few categories (except for gaming and sports, which we expect our target audience to be looking for).
Reflection
From the iterative process, we learned that ...
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