CS 6763 Assignment 2:Article Review & Critique

Maria A. CordellSeptember 30, 2004

Article

• Providing Advice for Multimedia Designers• Authors: Pete Faraday & Alistair Sutcliffe• Presented at CHI ‘98

Summary

• Prior research led to guidelines for directing the viewing/reading sequence in presentations

• Authors developed method for scripting and evaluating presentations

• A “design advisor tool” was developed and used to critique sample presentation

• Tool was tested with novice presentation designers

Research Goals

• Empirical investigation of attention to multimedia presentations

• Facilitating better presentation design through guidelines• Encapsulation of design guidelines within a design

advisement tool • A design tool thematically linked to the reading/viewing

thread in multimedia presentations

Path to Goals

• Designing the thread of attention:– plan the attentional thread to guided user’s viewing and reading

sequence– design effects and combinations of media to

• make important facts salient• reinforce the contact points between different media

– determine timing and synchronization to give user time to assimilate content

The Tool

• Paper-based guidelines alone too impractical

– too much time and effort required to follow guidelines

• Design tool comprised two parts:– authoring component– design advisor component

• Authoring component lets designer build first cut of presentation

• Advisor component compares result against presentation guidelines

Test & Evaluation

• Six novice designers asked to create presentationswith and without tool

• Results compared with previously established gold standard

• Advisor tool apparently improved presentations– many more solutions found with tool

advice than without

Evaluation & Conclusion

• Tool also raised some issues– tool significantly increased production time– tool sometimes overwhelmed designers with advice– some designers ignored the tool in favor of trial & error

• Conclusions– tool was useful to most, but… – any tool is only truly effective when the user has at

least basic knowledge of the design domain

Critique

• Methods were suitable for research goal • Advisement tool seems to work well, especially for

novice designers• Prior study results provided specific responsiveness data• Data used to build guidelines used by advisor tool• Research methods provide a baseline measure of

advisory tool effectiveness• The “annoyance factor” only superficially

covered– the Microsoft Office Assistant is one example

of a potentially annoying helper tool

Overlap with other Design Areas

• Has potential overlap with other design areas, including Web design

• For Web design, such a tool could analyze– font selection, size, and color– overall design color choices– use and layout of graphics and media elements– interrelation among elements and pages

• But—presentation design (and use) is linear; Web design and use is not

Current Web Design “Tools”

• Web design packages already include design support tools, but– none are tools in the sense described in this article– most are static tools or resources (e.g., page templates)– existing tools tend to focus on testing functions & checks for

common technical (coding) errors

Suitability for Web Design

• Advisement tools best suited for beginners• In the end, the most any tool can do is help novices

work through guidelines• To fully develop a design requires

– human experience and adaptability– thorough articulation—and understanding—of design

objectives

• For that level of support, tool-based help is a long way off