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INTERACTION DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR INTERACTIVE ...

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Of course, the convergence of television and the Web, each with its established<br />

set of design guidelines, brings with it a host of new and complex design issues. As Janet<br />

Murray writes, “Format and genre conventions are a changing, open-ended system,” and<br />

within such systems it will always be problematic to identify guidelines for action:<br />

The convergence of multiple forms of representation in the single digital medium<br />

means the collision of formats and genres. A web page with a box of digital video<br />

pasted into it is both page and screen, displayed upon a larger screen. The page is<br />

one kind of format, the screen another. The movie screen is different in aspect<br />

ratio from the television screen, and both are different from the computer. The<br />

page of a magazine is different from the page of a book or a newspaper… Each of<br />

these sets of conventions has their own paradigms, and when all of them are<br />

brought together we have an increase of potentially expressive elements but a<br />

conflict of conventions (forthcoming).<br />

The activity of accessing the Web from a television set is a very different type of<br />

interaction from access via a computer. On the other hand, the experience of watching<br />

and interacting with video content on a computer monitor is also very different from that<br />

of viewing on a television set. A comparison between MSN TV and Microsoft Media<br />

Center is an effective way to highlight some of these design challenges.<br />

4.5 CASE STUDY: MSN TV VS. MICROSOFT MEDIA CENTER<br />

Microsoft has experimented with both sides of the TV / Web convergence. A<br />

number of lessons about incorporating television and Web functionalities into one<br />

platform can be gleaned from studying the different ways in which MSN TV and the<br />

Media Center PC are successful and the ways in which they are not.<br />

4.5.1 MSN TV<br />

Microsoft bought WebTV in 1997 for $425 million and re-branded it MSN TV<br />

(http://www.webtv.com/pc). MSN TV’s developer site (http://developer.msntv.com/)<br />

includes standards on using HTML, CSS, Javascript, iTV, color, Flash, and streaming<br />

101

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