Transcript CS 6763 Assignment 2: Article Review & Critique

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