[in an "about to hang myself" late night note: so, Mark discovered and posted about Mozilla Popcorn Webmaker.
BUT, what I have in mind is twofold, for creating/editing content, but mostly, for commenting and discussion about the content. I might have to focus deeply into that part, as the first one is already developed. ]
Inspired by the processing example of video annotating, and also by the ease of use the Amara subtitling platform I started sketching what I think would be an easy video annotator. There would be some design constrains predefined:
- If content was to be video-centric, editing would also has to be video-centric
- I would break the “more content means more downward scroll” paradigm
- Conversation means flow. Promote that.
Learning from video editors, a timeline is a good place to start. I think it could work having several layers for the timeline, one showing the video, and overlaying audio re-takes, doodles, image overlays, or any other interactive media.
A different view of the same screen. Tool panels hidden, and conversation being shown along the video.
Video-centric editing
By this, I mean taking cues from the video world. First and foremost, there would be a timeline, and the annotating would happen directly over the video area, but in reference to that timeline.Video editing tools like cut, move, stretch are already familiar to many of us, and something like scrapbooking for video would further augment the video content.
Break the “more content means more downward scroll” paradigm
I remember the time were flame wars were started on the issue of scrolling. Usability consultant Jakob Nielsen even studied the scrollbar’s impact on user attention (ranging from almost inexistent in ’94, to moderate in ’99, and back to the level of “less attention” in his 2010 study).
These studies might be aging, but the case is that, today, most of the content online is served verticaly. However, if using video, I’d advocate for experimenting with horizontal movement (not necessarily scroll), given our heuristic notion of time passing on the horizontal axis. Asynchronous technologies fully support these kind of content delivery these days.
Conversation means flow. Promote that.
One of the goals for this assignment was to make the solution around conversation. Unfortunately, digitally mediated content is rarely conversational. What should we take into account, then? There are some guiding principles to engaging conversations, like acknowledging one another as equals, remembering that speaking out (or thinking aloud) help you think clearer, and that conversations can be organic, non structured, even messy.