Design, Deployment and Assessment of a Movie Archive System for Film Studies - A Case Study

While most R&D activities in the multimedia field today focus on developing new algorithms and tools to automatically understand, index, manage and present media contents so that they could be used to help reduce people’s manual efforts in dealing with large amount of media contents, the issues of linking the developing or developed algorithms and tools to realistic end-user scenarios and applications have largely been relegated to other disciplines such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design. In this paper we present our reflection and interpretation of a multimedia project developing an end-to-end novel application incorporating a state-of-the-art “movie scene detection and classification” technique. Unlike any other technology-oriented projects in the multimedia community, this project attempted to bring usability engineering to the core of our experimental system development, extensively adopting the procedures, tools and methods available in usability engineering throughout all stages of the project – user study, ideation, interaction sketching, system implementation and deployment. Largest amount of effort was put to deployment stage, which involved facilitating the web-based system to 256 students in a film study course during a 3 month-long semester, during which the lecturers from the course provided necessary administration and coordination such as access to students, assignments and lab tutorials in order to fully integrate the system to the delivery of the course. Qualitative and quantitative data on the use of the system were recorded over time and analysed, to better understand the nature and characteristics of the developed system and its novel features afforded by the multimedia technology. We summarise the findings and theissues arising from trying to adopt user-centred HCI methods and procedures in developing nonconventional multimedia system throughout all stages of its development.