multimedia interface design

As a novice multimedia interface designer, there are ample opportunities to learn from other professional designers who put up their design showcase over the Internet. The quality of these designs depends very much on the skill and experience of the designers.

How could we recognise a piece of good design work that we could learn from instead of blindly learning every designs that come across our path? This question becomes paramount important.

As an illustration of what I mean by that, let's look at a typical web design practice whereby a Flash entering page is presented to the users prior to its actual home page. This design idea is indeed very innovative and neat.

However, when we visit a site with such design approach, and being shown the same content page for every visits, do you think we will want to see it again and again?

The answer is of course not. Hence, the designer will often include a "skip" link to give impatient or frequent visitors an escape route to go straight to the home page. Again, from the design point of view, there is a question of where to place this link; top or bottom, left or right, and how big should the font size be.

If we understand the design principles for having the Flash entering page as to captivate the attention of the visitors and give them a snap shot of what to be expected of the website, we would have created many different version of the Flash entering content page to provide varieties and refreshment upon each visit by the same users.

In the real life, things may not be that straight forward. There is a budget to consider, manpower constraint, time pressure to launch the site, etc. that may prevent the designer to do the optimal. But at least, the designer could have designed it in such a way that it is able to detect whether this is a returning users and if so, automatically skip the Flash entering page and bring them right into the destination page.

These are the attributes we would expect from a good designer: be able to recognise a good design from a bad one, identify its underlying interface design principles, learn from it and finally apply the principles to a novel design situation systematically.

Besides understanding various design principles, a good interface designer always places the targeted audience on the centre stage, and look at the aesthetics, interaction, and information requirements of this audience.

The importance of these three design perspectives can be illustrated by looking at why a person is well-like in the real world.

First, a well-like person has a pleasing appearance so as to attract and capture the attention of others; this is aesthetic, presentation, or visual design.

Second, the person possesses great interpersonal and communication skills so as to entice others in the conversation; this is the interaction design.

Third, to maintain the flow of conversation, the person must be able to engage in topics of interests to the other parties; this is information design.

Multimedia interface design must be grounded from these three design perspectives while supported by sound design principles. Inadequate attention to any of these would probably reduce the appropriateness of the design, and making the design less useful,  usable and desirable.