Subject: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar To: faculty@vtopus.cs.vt.edu, students@csgrad.cs.vt.edu Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 12:01:38 -0500 (EST) From: "John M. Carroll" Human-Computer Interaction Seminar: Wednesday, February 19 4:00 p.m., McBryde 224 "Developing Guidelines for Multimedia User Interface Design" Alistair Sutcliffe, Centre for HCI Design, City University London and Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech Abtstract: This presentation will report a series of experimental studies on multimedia user interfaces which led to development and testing of new design guidelines for information presentation and attentional control of the users' reading/viewing sequence. The product tested was a commercial CDROM on medical subejct matter from Silverplatter The first study investigates attention using eye tracking analysis of the user's viewing sequence. This demonstrated effects of animation, use of captions, and combinations of speech and image on multimedia viewing. The second study tested user memory performance after viewing a sequence from the CDROM. This provided a baseline for reauthoring the product using guidelines derived from the first study and our previous work (Sutcliffe & Faraday 1994). The third study tested user memory of, and attention to the reauthored sequence and demonstrated improved retention of information in short term recall. Finally a control study was carried out by authoring a mono-medium version of the sequence with the same information content. The users' recall from the control condition demonstrated that multimedia does indeed improve information delivery and short term learning, and the redesigned version showed that guidelines based on empirical evidence and cognitive principles can improve performance of tutorial products. This work will be discussed in the perspective of a theoretically principled approach to multimedia design and the wider picture of the relative contributions of pedagogical and presentation design to educational multimedia applications.