Making It Simpler

We thought we had a pretty good idea what the market needed. And while some of our intuitions were proven correct, we still learned a lot that ultimately will make Intel® DHCAT 3.0 a much better platform evaluation instrument.

In the late spring of 2007, we gathered several groups of consumers in Portland, Oregon. We asked them to talk about buying and using Media PCs. We wanted to learn more about they researched about Media PCs, what features they valued most, and showed them some mockups of different results screens to see which ones were easiest to understand. This was a professionally-designed consumer market research study done in conjunction with our Intel’s Media and Acoustics Perception Lab (MAPL), based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Many findings came out of these meetings. But to boil it down, we learned that these consumers want:

• A simple & quick summary of the quality of a media PC’s capabilities
• Terminology that’s easy to understand
• To search and prioritize usages when comparing media PCs.
• A visual comparison between the multiple media PCs to make picking the right media PC easier

We were especially interested in what these people wanted to see about a Media PC’s capabilities to help them choose the right system. Here, we learned that people:

• like to see multiple systems compared to each other on one page in a matrix
• want a visual representation, a quick snapshot of information
• like a rating system (i.e. stars) something in which they are familiar

These folks didn’t want all the information “dumbed down.” Yes, they did want a quick summary of results they could scan to get a snapshot of a system’s capabilities, so we greatly simplified Intel® DHCAT 3.0’s main results screen. But they also wanted to be able to drill deeper into those results, and find out more about specific capabilities. So we added that feature, both in Intel® DHCAT 3.0 itself, and in the online results browser.

The key design driver for version 3.0 was to make things as simple as they should be, but still provide access to underlying details about a Media PC’s capabilities. So we incorporated learnings like these into Intel® DHCAT 3.0, and we think the tool now strikes the right balance between a quick, simple summary of a Media PC’s capabilities, and the more “atomic” levels of detail about specific system capabilities that users also want to evaluate.