Designing effective interfaces for audiovisual media

Abstract

Audiovisual media is an attractive and rich source of information, widely used in education, entertainment and industry. Unfortunately, audiovisual media can take painfully long hours to author, edit and navigate. This dissertation looks at ways to make creation, navigation and manipulation of audiovisual media easier and more convenient. In particular, we explore novel interaction techniques applied to three specific domains: speech recordings, lecture videos and presentations. For each domain, we propose a design solution to facilitate user interaction with the medium and implement the solution in a prototype interface. In doing so, we propose several design principles for effective audiovisual media interfaces that generalize to a wide range of applications and user tasks.