Overview

BlueStream is an online media repository used by the University of Michigan to facilitate use of multimedia such digital video, audio, images, and documents in higher education. It is currently managed by the Digital Media Commons at UofM. It has a state of art technology which has the following four main components:

Digital asset ingestion and management
Video encoding and logging
Content management and production
Digital rights management

Goal

Use evaluation methods like contextual enquiry, interaction diagrams, surveys, competitive reviews, heuristic evaluations and think-aloud tests to conduct a thorough usability evaluation of BlueStream and find major areas of user frustration.

Methods and Reports

    1. Interaction Map
      bluestream
      click to see full version
    2. Competitive Review

      As part of our analysis of BlueStream, we conducted a comparative analysis. The purpose of this analysis was to look at what other products perform similar tasks to BlueStream. BlueStream is powered by a product called Ancept Media Server, so we looked for other products that work similarly to the Ancept Media server. We found three products that were commonly mentioned: Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Media WorkSpace, which is made by EMC, Cumulus by Canto, and Telescope made by North Plains.

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    3. Survey

      We 
conducted
 a 
Survey
 with
 the 
current 
users 
of 
BlueStream 
to 
know
 more 
about 
their 
interaction
 with
 it.
We 
used
 the 
Zoomerang 
survey
 website 
to 
post
 our
 survey 
for 
the 
pool 
of
 2137. 
Initial
 pilots
 were 
done 
to
account 
for
 discrepancies
 and 
errors 
on 
our
 part
 and 
also
 to
 make 
a
 judgment
 about
 the
 time
 required 
to
complete 
the
 survey.
      downloadFull Report

       

    4.  Heuristic EvaluationFor this evaluation, we looked at several of BlueStream’s AJAX templates for these heuristics. Errors were classified as being violations of one or more of the above heuristics. The severity of each error was then rated on a scale of zero to four, where zero is not a usability issue, and four is an imperative “must fix”.

      downloadFull Report

       

    5. Think Aloud User Testing
      We conducted five tests with students who had never used BlueStream before. This was done to ensure that learned behaviors would not influence the test results. Each test subject was asked to complete thirteen goal‐oriented tasks while having the screen, their face, and their voice recorded. We also took notes on the test while it was in progress.The tests revealed several important findings:

      • Overall, people like and appreciate the concepts of both interfaces, and would be willing to use them if offered as part of their own coursework.
      • Users were able to accomplish most tasks with little to no trouble.
      • Some features, particularly those related to search, annotations, and text transcriptions, were not at apparent as they could be. We also have several key recommendations:
      • Lectures: make the Annotations/Speech pulldown menu more prominent by adding a border
      • Lectures: draw a border around the text search box and its results area to indicate the connection between them
      • Lectures: underline times in the Annotations/Speech list to make them more link‐ like
      • Lectures: remove links from dates in the list of lectures to disambiguate their function
      • Lectures: highlight search terms in search results, and indicate when there are no results
      • Library‐DVR: make the search box more obvious by changing its initial text to “Search”

downloadFull Report