Media: IBM gets up to All Sorts in Almaden

"IBM User Experience Research group puts the dot on the I" is a kind of organisational overview for the department that Steve Cousins, senior manager of IBM User Sciences and Experience Research (USER) group, leads at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA. It jumps about, but, on the way, it does touch on some interesting things.

For instance, because the team interpret their brief of user experience very widely, they are asking: 'How does content protection apply to the user experience? Cousins gives a scenario in which a consumer buys a movie but can only watch that movie on one DVD player, because of technology that is designed to protect intellectual property. "This can make a user very unhappy," he said. IBM USER group is involved with helping to create a single, unified format for high definition DVDs. Through xCP technology, a consumer could store content on a network and share that content with any device on the network. "By providing better technology that's less intrusive, we can reduce the friction between our customers (the media) and their customers (media consumers)."'

Associated Link: IBM Ease of Use Journal: IBM User Experience Research group puts the dot on the "I"

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