Watching and creating videos have become predominant parts of our daily lives. Video is becoming the norm for a wide range of purposes from entertainment, to training and education, marketing, and communication. Users go beyond just watching videos. They want to experience and interact with content across the different types of videos. As they do so, significant digital traces accumulate on the viewed videos which provide an important source of information for designing and developing tools for video viewing interfaces. This dissertation proposes the next generation video management interface which creates video experiences that go beyond just pushing the play button. It uses how people view and interact with contemporary video to design strategies for future video interfaces. This has allowed the development of new tools for navigating and managing videos that can be easily integrated into existing systems. To help define some design guidelines for the video interface, a behavioural analysis of users’ video viewing actions (n = 19) was performed. The results demonstrate that participants actively watch videos and most participants tend to skip parts of videos and re-watch specific portions from a video multiple times. Based on the findings, new fast navigation and management strategies are developed and validated in search tasks using a single-video history (n = 12), a video viewing summary (n = 10) and multiple-videos history (n = 10). Evaluation of results of the proposed tools show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-practice methods. This indicates the value of users’ video viewing actions. Navigating other forms of videos, such as interactive videos, introduces another issue with the selection of interactive objects within videos to direct users to different portions of the video. Due to the time-based nature of the videos, these interactive objects are only visible for a certain duration of the video, which makes their activation difficult. To alleviate this problem a novel acquisition technique (Hold) is created, which temporally pauses the objects while the user interacts with the target. This technique has been integrated into a rich media interface (MediaDiver) which made such interaction possible for users.

Defended successfully by Abir Al Hajri on 10th January 2015 for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.).