ABSTRACT

The PHD research, hereafter described, consists in finding answers for the following research problem: What principles, at both the graphic and interaction levels, should iTV applications’ Interface Design (Interactive Television) follow, so that their interfaces are better suited to the special requirements of Portuguese senior users?

To address the described problem, we started off with an extensive literature review in order to check if data already existed in other research approaches that could be transposed into our own work. We found that the available seniors digital interface design literature only considered human factors and limitations, therefore discarting limitations that we suspected that could be imposed to the interface Design’s by, first, the iTV Middleware software and STBs (hardware), second, by the limitations imposed by the TV set medium, and third, by the typical TV broadcast graphic elements.

So we decided to direct our research towards closing the gaps and suspections detected in the literature review and to compare them with software and hardware limitations, medium limitations, broadcast limitations and iNeighbour TVs Field Trial findings.