December 08, 2004
Interview with Tivo User Experience Director
PVRBlog got an interview with Margret Schmidt, the Director of User Experience at Tivo. She explains how much work it takes to create great user interfaces. Although it looks simple, it certainly isn't as Apple's MP3 competitors can surely attest.The design concept is a walkthrough of the most frequent tasks we expect users to undertake. If the stakeholders believe the concept meets the requirements, we begin usability testing of the design. TiVo has an on-site lab and a strong research team. Typically we will create a fully functional prototype that we can display on a TV and control with a TiVo remote -- it feels just like the real thing! Based on the findings, we iterate on the design. (Some times *many* iterations!)
