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CS 6763 Assignment 2: Article Review & Critique Maria A. Cordell September 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 presentations with 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