319 Global Co-Operation in the New Millennium The 9th European Conference on Information Systems Bled, Slovenia, June 27-29, 2001 INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN THE LIVING ROOM: A CASE STUDY OF PERSONALIZED INTERACTIVE TV DESIGN * George Lekakos, Kostas Chorianopoulos, Diomidis Spinelis eLectronic Trading Research Unit (eLTRUN), Department of Management Science & Technology Athens University of Economics & Business, 47 Evelpidon & Lefkados Str., 113 62 Athens, Greece Tel.: +30(1)8203663, Fax: +30(1)8203664 glekakos@aueb.gr, chk@aueb.gr, dds@aueb.gr Georgios Lekakos, Kostas Chorianopoulos, Diomidis Spinelis ABSTRACT The birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993, particularly its graphical user interface, offered marketers opportunities that were previously unimaginable. The WWW allows advanced marketing activities and more particularly interactive marketing, as the user is actively involved in responding to the vendor’s promotion campaign. Interactive TV, also referred to as iTV, combines the appeal and mass audience of traditional TV with the interactive features such as those currently available on the Web. Although personalisation is a practice used widely on the Internet by many sites, applying personalisation techniques over interactive television presents a number of difficulties. In this paper we focus on the design and testing process of the User Interface (UI) for the Interactive & Personalized Advertisement TV viewer. We argue that there are a lot of challenges involved in the designing of interactive TV applications. These are related with the differences of the medium from the traditional PC based Information Systems in terms of input and output devices, viewing environment, number of users and low level of expertise in PC usage. 1. INTRODUCTION As digital technology and consumer behaviour evolve, marketers can and need to continuously enhance the value of their digital marketing offering. The birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993, and particularly its graphical user interface, offered marketers opportunities that were previously unimaginable (Poon and Jevons, 1997). Interactive TV, also referred to as iTV, combines the appeal and mass audience of traditional TV with the interactive features currently available on the Web (Developer, 1999) offering viewers ‘one-click’ access to services and information. For the marketer, the great potential of interactivity rests in the capability the Web offers for better understanding the viewer’s behaviour and building personalised relations with individual consumers. In the context of iTV advertising, personalisation refers to the use of technology and viewer information to tailor commercials and their respective interactive content to each individual viewer profile. Using such * This study was partially funded by the IST-1999-11038, iMEDIA Project of the Commission of the European Union