Designing Socially-Aware Video Exploration Interfaces

Abstract

Online video sharing systems, such as YouTube, do not provide users enough support to explore community videos that portray people within their social circle. Such services typically consider each video clip as an isolated object, and not as part of a set of related clips. Even though social networks archive media based on higher-order social relationships, they do not provide support for searching and navigating media content that was captured at a particular event by different people. The contribution of this paper is a web-based interface, and the underlying system infrastructure, that allow for socially-aware exploration of media assets from an event. The system combines the best from both video sharing systems and social networks, allowing users to explore and navigate (fragments of) video clips based on their own personal/social interests. The work resulted, as well, in the identification of key requirements for this novel type of socially-aware interfaces. This paper reports on comparative results from a two-phased study conducted during the last four years. The research effort includes a full implementation and deployment of a system, and a series of experiments and user trials that confirmed that our design decisions enable users to explore and view videos they care about.