GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-91-18
Title:
Multimedia Help: A Literature Survey and a Preliminary Experimental Design
Authors:
Piyawadee "Noi" Sukaviriya
Abstract:
Multimedia has become widely accepted as an effective interface for
exploratory education. Despite this fact, little is known about this new
form of interface - in which context is it appropriate and which media
should be used for presenting what kinds of information. Designing a
multimedia interface is currently based on programmer's intuitions and,
increasingly, design skills of graphic artists and educators whose
experiences are on designing presentations on media. Multimedia applied
to a help interface is a dynamic form of communication capable of bringing
as many medium as appropriate into use. However, lack of understanding
of the tie between efficacy in learning in a multiple-media help
environment and effectiveness in user's operational performance implies a
need of studies to understand this relationship. What we want in the
long run from these studies is a model which would help predict the
relationship between how users learn from different and intergrated media
and translate the information learned into activities required to operate
in interface environments.
Sun has a strong interest in supporting multimedia help in order to ease
the learning process of the increasingly more sophisticated OPEN LOOK
environment; the target audience are non-technical users. The objective
of this Collaborative Research (CR) between Georgia Tech and SunSoft,
Inc. is to investigate through conducting an experiment effectiveness of
various mappings from help information to media. The investigation will
explore, singularly and in combination, use of media such as text, static
graphics, video, speech audio, and context-sensitive animation, in the
context of online help. Expected results are experimental data analysis,
discrete recommendations for integration of multimedia to Sun online help
support, and the software architecture for a multimedia help prototype to
be developed for the experiment.
Keywords:
Help interfaces, multimedia interfaces, online support systems
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