INTERACTION DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR INTERACTIVE ...

the ABC telecast throughout the evening” (ABC Enhanced TV Press Release, March 18,
2002).
3.6 DOCUMENTARIES
Documentaries lend themselves well to interactive programming due to the
encyclopedic nature of their content. Documentaries are meant to be informative,
educational, and engaging. While documentaries traditionally do attract viewers with
competitive elements, nor do they draw large communities of viewers who are eager to
interact in real time, the incredible depth of information available – that is, the hundreds
of hours of extra footage and archival materials that would otherwise never be available
to viewers – can be strategically leveraged by iTV producers to produce a more
personalized and compelling viewing experience. By giving the viewer options to explore
various aspects of the subject matter more deeply, he/she can play an active role in
“determining how the documentary is represented and how much information is
conveyed, as much as producers and directors do when filming” (Curran, 2003).
In 2001, BBC Science aired Walking with Beasts, a major digital animation series
accessible to digital satellite, digital terrestrial, Web, broadband, and cable television
viewers across the U.K. As illustrated by Figure 3.8, the iTV program allowed viewers to
customize their viewing experience by selecting from different audio and video
components, choosing between multiple narrators, active pop-up fact boxes, or watching
synchronized picture-in-picture clips highlighting scientific evidence behind a discovery
or presenting information about the making of the program itself (Curran, 2003).
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