Enrich User Experience

Debasis Bandyopadhyay, Head, TCS Innovation Labs - Kolkata

Positive user experience is a key differentiator for businesses today. User delight depends chiefly on ease of use, speed, and sensory appeal of products. And at TCS, we believe that enriching user experience is not a last mile, cosmetic deliverable. We understand the excitement and challenges our customers encounter in contending with information and communication technology explosion across channels. We are therefore exploring concepts for enriching user experience for our customers and our customer’s customer, even before we design applications, at the TCS Innovation Labs.

Our aspiration for enriching user experience is to build more intuitive software, for which our research aims to understand and build on the nuances of Human Computer Interaction. One such innovation that we worked on this year is our novel and user friendly onscreen keyboard, which can be operated through a TV remote controller. The layout of this keyboard, conceptualized by TCS, is based on exhaustive user survey. Our current research is focused on creating multi-modal techniques like using gestures and audio together to create a friendlier and more accurate system. We are looking to use audio command based solutions to control the non critical controls in a vehicle or home TV in order to enhance the user experience.

User interactions are getting increasingly collaborative today. And with video conferencing, web 2.0 and social networking platforms the borders between internet, television and computers and seeming to be blurring. In this light, we are also exploring Internet-TV Mash-ups, Social Networking and Entertainment Applications on TV and three-dimensional virtual environments to enhance user experience. A virtual environment may itself be modeled on an office space or a learning centre to affect training, simulation, and collaboration; with users creating graphical representations for themselves. We are looking at how such environments can be made more realistic and easy to use by using real-world images to build objects within the environment. We have also focused on building context aware applications that support context driven presentation of information and services to the user and automatic execution of a service based on context. Examples of context information include user information such as user profiles, identity, role, presence etc, device profiles and basic context data such as user location and time. One such context aware application that we are developing is a Context Aware Content Recommendation System. This application uses context data such as user profiles, devices profiles, time, location and other available data from Internet to dynamically create a content recommendation list for user. The content (sourced from TV or Internet) is also adapted for the user’s end device. Context aware solutions also bring in much awaited information to the hands users which are based on multiple data sources and hence have a high level of usability and accuracy. Overall it improves user lifestyle and experience. We are currently using techniques such as semantic processing, web ontologies, rule based systems and complex event processing to develop context aware applications.

The roadmap to User Experience leads to multimedia rich devices, novel Human Machine Interactions and better input devices. Context aware information rendered on any form of device is the way to future.

Case study