A Collaborative Design-by-Sketching Conceptual Design Tool for Multimedia Application Development

Abstract

Multimedia technology is advancing at a significant rate and is now revolutionizing the way in which computers are being used in business. Multimedia technology can only benefit a company when applications are properly developed to exploit technology, in order to enhance the company’s operation. Unfortunately, to develop high-quality, cost-effective multimedia applications is not an easy task. There are many issues and challenges that developers are currently facing. Issues such as the difficulties in defining the project scope, communication difficulties amongst the development team, and estimate difficulties, making the development process both labour-intensive and time-consuming (Li and Willis, 1998). Sponsors of multimedia projects are often unsure of their requirements at the start of the project. Sponsor/user involvement in the abstract (conceptual) design stage of the project is therefore important. This chapter presents a computer assisted design-by-sketching tool to help with the conceptual design of multimedia applications. The tool helps sponsors to define their requirement incrementally and the design team to prototype their ideas interactively and collaboratively. It assists the developer to define the balance between consistency, which helps the readers (users) to understand the overall structure, and diversity, which gives freshness to the design. This tool will also enable re-usability of the designed components in future projects and maintainability of the application that it has developed.