EMedia Professional - Author, Author, March 1997

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Authoring a Blind Date: Are the Tools Up to It?

Kathy Kozel

EMedia Professional, March 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

If you can think back to when a parent tried to prepare you for your first date, or if you've ever dated someone who clearly never got that talk, then you have sure-fire positive and negative models for mannerly new media authoring.

Think of the last CD-ROM you authored as a blind date for the end-user. Run it through a checklist of post-date post-mortems: Was your program a good listener? Was it attractive, clean, and appropriately dressed? Above all, did it behave well and display good manners?

Our goal is to build the ultimate first date program--one that leaves the end-user asking for a second, but sadly, the authoring tool vendors are lousy at what should be a match-making role. They should be encouraging and supportive of our wish to craft charming and alluring programs. Instead, the tools often make it much easier to build boorish and rude titles. In some cases, "doing the right thing" in an authoring tool (in other words, making your program well-behaved) can be impossible.

Authoring tool vendors and the authors who use them should heed the likes of Miss Manners, Jane Austen, and Donald Norman: human-computer interaction is inherently social. If we would not expect our children, friends, co-workers, and potential dates to be ill-mannered, then neither should we tolerate it from the interactive programs we create. As fanciful as the CD-as-date metaphor sounds, a decade of research at Stanford University offers overwhelming evidence in support. In the 1996 Cambridge University Press book, The Media Equation, researchers Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass summarize results from their "Social Responses to Communication Technologies" project. The book's subtitle captures it nicely: "How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places."

"WEAR YOUR GOOD SHIRT"

In new media, attractiveness has both an audio and visual component. One of the reasons why media aesthetics are ironically tough to deliver in a multimedia program is that most authors don't come from an audio-visual background. Authors may be coming from graphic design, or information systems, or perhaps video--but rarely audio. Yet multimedia authors are, by definition, expected to include multiple media.

Although the desktop publishing craze has yielded a healthy number of books on layout and typography, most authoring tools offer only the barest of layout capabilities, with Quark Immedia a notable exception. Until the most recent version of Macromedia Director, there were virtually no layout tools for aligning elements on the screen. In pre-Director 5.0 days, I actually saw developers stick Post-It notes to the monitor or use other open windows as grids for placing graphic elements.

But even if the tools add all the screen layout capabilities found in desktop publishing, what happens when you add animated graphics and video, not to mention audio? What about fades and transitions?

Since not all authors have the luxury of working with a team of media specialists, the tools should give us a way to practice good media aesthetics without having to twist the tool's arm. Audio fades, for example, are notoriously hard if not impossible to apply in many authoring tools, so we're left with jarring transitions between songs or other sounds or silence. We must demand that authoring tools make it a default choice to provide more pleasant transitions between sounds from different parts of a program.

Visual transitions, too, should be handled more supportively. While most tools do provide multiple transition choices--like dissolves, wipes, and slides--there are usually no guidelines for appropriate aesthetic use, and no way to adapt them for the different runtime environments. Pixel dissolves, for example, may perform very differently on different machines, and sometimes run too slowly to use. The authoring tool should provide a means for setting dissolve parameters which are used intelligently at runtime to alter, accelerate, or disable transitions. Of course, some tools do allow you to program this capability, but good visual aesthetics should be built in to the authoring tool.

"BE A GOOD LISTENER, BE POLITE"

It's been argued that the most valued trait in a romantic partner is being a good listener. Good listening is all about acknowledgement: you talk, they listen, but most importantly they demonstrate they're listening, albeit in subtle ways.

In an interactive multimedia program, one of the greatest frustrations for an end-user occurs when clickable hot spots give no immediate feedback. The user presses a button and then wonders, "Did it hear me?" And with the seeking and transfer times coming off a CD-ROM, the answer might not be obvious for a while. The users have clicked all over the screen, stacking up havoc-wreaking mouse events, and the user may have even considered pulling the plug. All this derives from a simple failure to acknowledge--to nod and indicate, "I hear you. I'm thinking."

Good button behavior has long been well-documented--since just after the arrival of the Macintosh, beginning with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and followed by those of Microsoft and other GUI developers. Basically, buttons (or other clickable spots) should change in some way on mouse down and they should also be forgiving if the user changes his or her mind (indicated by rolling off the hot spot before letting up on the mouse button). It's so simple and natural that very few software users are even conscious of button behavior either in the operating system or applications. But trying to implement this in an authoring tool has been amazingly hard.

The most absurd example of this problem happened two years ago at the San Francisco MacWorld, during an in-depth demo of the Apple Media Tool. When I asked the rep to make a simple "Mac-legal" button, he couldn't. He made hot spots do various things including changing their shape after you let go of the mouse, but in that first release version he could not make it adhere to Apple's own interface laws. When I questioned him about this, he said, "This is multimedia, not software." Apparently multimedia was given a special etiquette-exempt status. That year I experienced the same scenario with Authorware. Although both of these tools have since been upgraded to include better button behavior, adhering to basic social norms should never have been viewed as an add-on.

Another rule of etiquette is to say "excuse me" when you have to interrupt a conversation to leave the table or take a phone call. Authoring tools need to make it as easy as possible to show wait icons--at the very least the watch or hourglass--whenever the program is not able to accept user input. Even better would be a way to include custom progress bars or clever animations, allowing the computer to assure the users that it's busy, it hasn't forgotten them.

And how rude is it to get in the car with someone who immediately tunes the radio to their favorite station, without asking you about either the music choice or the volume? Yet so many multimedia programs provide no means of changing, disabling, or adjusting the volume of the background music. The user should never have to exit your program in order to adjust the music or video settings, but many tools don't provide a simple path (or even a hard one) for adding this control.

TOWARD A MANNERLY MEDIA AESTHETIC (AND A SECOND DATE)

These are countless examples of the way politeness should be used in a multimedia program. Some are documented in both Reeves and Nass's The Media Equation and the Addison-Wesley book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. But just about anything you'd consider a rule for polite human interaction applies to authoring: don't make the other person feel stupid; don't dominate the conversation; do be helpful; do be complimentary; do be sensitive to the other person; don't make offensive comments; don't be obscure; don't be dishonest; and╔you get the idea.

And if anyone wants to start a charm school for authoring tool vendors as well as authors, I'd like to suggest some required texts. Besides the Reeves and Nass title and The Art of..., I'd recommend Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and Things That Make Us Smart available as separate books or together on a Voyager-published CD-ROM. Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are media-aesthetic essentials. And when you've finished those, read or rent Sense and Sensibility again. But it may not be all that difficult to figure out. If you can think back to when a parent tried to prepare you for your first date, or if you've ever dated someone who clearly never got that talk, then you have sure-fire positive and negative models for mannerly new media authoring.

Kathy Kozel, an EMedia Professional contributing editor and regular columnist for Author, Author, is a multimedia developer based in Redondo Beach, California.

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