A study involving interviews with experienced educational multimedia developers examined multimedia production, professional roles and responsibilities, factors contributing to successful multimedia development, production tips and techniques from practitioners, and hardware and software. Article discusses implications of the findings and makes…

Presents a study undertaken to determine what types of visuals are being used for presentations in different business organizations. Discusses findings in terms of: description of respondents; creating and using visual aids for presentations; presentation software used; using special software features; and presenting the visual aids. Includes…

Observations, interviews, and a survey were used to study the staff of an educational-technology center which has been producing educational software (CDs) for about five years. Results showed that educators generally approached electronic curriculum development in terms of either programming processes or curricular concepts. Differences between…

A qualitative study of three Chinese interactive multimedia programs and interviews with multimedia designers were undertaken to develop user interface design guidelines for Chinese multimedia designers. The study revealed that most multimedia designers do not have formal training in user interface design and employed few guidelines. Recommends…

This paper presents the use of an XML grammar for two complementary projects--CHAMELEON (Cooperative Hypermedia Adaptive MultimEdia Learning Objects) and EIT (Enabling Informal Teamwork). Areas of applications are modular courseware documents and the collaborative authoring process of didactical units. A number of requirements for a suitable…

Identifies guidelines from the literature relating to screen design and design of interactive instructional materials. Describes two types of guidelines--those aimed at enhancing motivation and those aimed at preventing loss of motivation--for typography, graphics, color, and animation and audio. Proposes a framework for considering motivation in…

Following a review of the literature, this paper reports on a study conducted with multimedia developers on their use of project management systems. The research questions that guided this study focused on whether multimedia developers use project management techniques; which kind they use; and which management techniques are of particular…

"Design Inspection Reviews" are structured meetings in which participants follow certain rules of procedure and behavior when conducting detailed readings of design plans to identify errors and misunderstandings. The technique is widely used in the software engineering industry, where it is demonstrably more effective than testing at…

Describes an experiment in which presentation size and text length is varied in a HyperCard application. Students performed a fact-retrieval task from a reference handbook. No interaction is found between these two independent variables. Performance is significantly better for the longer texts, but no significant difference is found for the two…

Examines a three-month software design activity in which mixed teams of girls and boys designed and implemented multimedia astronomy resources for younger students. Finds that the configuration of social, physical, and cognitive spaces in the project environment contributed to a positive change in girls' level of access. Discusses implications for…

The usability of Instructional Multimedia (IMM) applications is vital for their success and for the satisfaction of their users, as the confusion resulting from using poorly designed programs can be particularly detrimental to learning performance. A number of approaches for expert-based evaluation of IMM have been proposed during the past few…

This paper presents a means of storyboarding in multimedia courseware design that uses Microsoft PowerPoint as a storyboarding tool. In six undergraduate and four graduate teacher-education technology classes, students designed multimedia courseware using HyperStudio/ToolBook with three different storyboarding methods--index cards, paper forms,…

Reports on the results of a survey of software publishers and market researchers for educators that was conducted to determine development, purchasing, and upgrading plans for educational computer technology. Highlights include operating systems, including Macintosh, DOS, and Windows; equipment needs, including memory, monitors, and special…

Focuses on criteria for design and evaluation of the user interface of foreign language multimedia software. A hybrid model is proposed that combines cognitive and software engineering approaches. Based on this proposed contextualized model of interface design, domain-specific evaluation criteria are developed to describe how well the user…

Presents a World Wide Web page model that reacts to pre-defined events and performs actions like "prefetching" automatically. Discusses the active index, conceptual page model; design of the client system, status of the current implementation, prefetching algorithm, an experiment of the algorithm, experimental results of the active index…