Framework for constructing task-space to support novice multimedia authoring

Despite the growing demand of complex multimedia contents and the evolution of the authoring tools, many home computer users face significant obstacles in an attempt to familiarize themselves with multimedia authoring tasks. Many authoring tools have evolved to accommodate advanced skills typically performed by professionals and to introduce new authoring styles that are only possible with digital tools. As a result, interface designs of such tools have become more complicated and are often intimidating to novices thus preventing them from undertaking even the initial task. For users with little knowledge in multimedia authoring, one of the challenging issues is generating mental representation of the task that they are trying to perform. Being unable to construct proper task-spaces often results in a poor action plan, leading to an inefficient or undesirable outcome. We investigate and propose a new framework for constructing and presenting task-spaces with which users can interact in order to explore rather complex task-spaces during multimedia authoring tasks. The framework is grounded in the cognitive models originally developed in the context of planning and problem-solving tasks. We then illustrate how the proposed framework might be used in practical examples and suggest possible modifications or new features for existing authoring tools. The proposed framework was evaluated in the user studies.