An Investigation of iDTV User Needs in Brazilian and Italian Communities: Preliminary Cross-Cultural Findings

The development of Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) represents a new paradigm of interactivity. Being a massive communication mean, the emerging applications of this new technology should take into account the different cultural aspects involving the user experience. When viewers with different needs and cultural aspects are users of a same iTV application, the elaboration of appropriate interaction design solutions for these applications becomes a challenge. In fact, user experience with technology is a subject that has also gained ground in HCI research as a way to maximize user satisfaction. The need of focusing on users and their cultural aspects increase when the use of the same technology and applications involves extremely different users like the ones located in very distant geographic locations and immersed in diametrically opposed cultures. In this work, we describe an investigation of user requirements in such a context consisting of two communities, one in Brazil and one in Italy. We also present how cross-cultural aspects may be mapped into specific features useful for early design of an iDTV interactive system.