THE “8 MULTIMEDIA RULES”

The “8 Multimedia Rules”

The “8 Multimedia Rules”

Introduction

Multimedia technology can considerably increase the options open to the user-interface designer. However, the lack of detailed design knowledge and widely available design experience make multimedia user-interface design and evaluation ill-defined and unprincipled activities.

Although many view multimedia just as the use of more than one medium to present information to users (Nielsen, 1995), multimedia is much more than this. In our research, we adopt a wider definition, encompassing both input and output media and focusing on human-computer interaction rather than on the technological aspects. In this way, we consider interactions with animations, gesture recognition, speech input, speech synthesis, haptic input and output and virtual reality as examples or special cases of multimedia. (Arens, 2006, 306)

The “8 Multimedia Rules”

Multimedia systems try to take advantage of human senses to facilitate human-computer interaction, and human-human, computer mediated communication. Considering that we live in a world of multimedia events (Arens, 2006, 306), “many people believe that multimedia communication is natural and corresponds more closely with how the brain has developed” (Baecker, 2005, 654), and, therefore, “multimedia exercises the whole mind”. In this viewpoint, the human brain is seen as having evolved in a multisensory environment, where simultaneous input on different channels was essential for survival. Thus, “the processing of the human brain has been fine-tuned to allow simultaneous sampling and comparison between different channels” (Baecker, 2005, 654). Multimedia systems have the potential to make appropriate and efficient use of human perceptual and cognitive capabilities by making our interaction with computers more natural.

A related feature to naturalness is realness or the degree of correspondence between the representation and the real thing. Naturalness and realness are similar but not the same. Naturalness is concerned with the mapping between the stimuli and the senses taking recognition of the fact that people normally gain information from the world from multiple senses (e.g. hearing an explosion would cause people to look for a cloud of smoke or flames). On the other hand, realness is concerned with how close the representation of the explosion corresponds to an actual explosion. (Baecker, 2005, 654)

How, and on what basis, is a particular medium selected for the presentation of a particular piece of information? Each medium has both constraining and enabling features (Arens et al., 1993) and affords different interactions, offers different communicative intentions and has its own rules and conventions.

But is it enough to have knowledge of each medium in order to make an adequate selection? Some argue that it also depends on the user's knowledge and experience of a domain and task: if the domain and task are new to the user, a concrete representation seems to be best; if the user has a lot of experience in the domain and task, then a more abstract form may be adequate - adapted from (Barnard, 2004, 48). (Arens, 2006, 306) adds that the usefulness of different media in presentation situations is closely related to the complexity of the idea being ...