Design, deployment and assessment of a movie archive system in a film studies context

This thesis describe our work in developing a movie archive system for students of Film Studies in Dublin City University. In particular, our system uses several recent multimedia technologies to automatically process digital video content but at the same time we use the usability engineering process to relate to the real tasks of real users in their real environments. We investigate how real users take advantage of technologies in a movie browsing system. By designing, building, deploying and assessing the usage of a technology in a user-focused way, the overall impact of a movie browsing system can be determined holistically. The application domain we work in is film studies where students need to study movie contents and analyse movie sequences. Our work began by identification of user needs through observations, focus groups and usability testing, followed by sketching and prototyping a web-based system. We then deployed the system to film study classes over a semester, monitored usage and gathered quantitative as well as qualitative data. Focused experiments were carried out to assess students’ performance and satisfaction levels. Our findings show expected patterns of usage of a real-user setting outside the lab, but at the same time highlighted issues that need to be further investigated. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies. Findings from the experiment shows better performance in the essay assessments and higher satisfaction levels. An interesting finding shows students are more engaged with the newly-introduced software application and take longer time to complete the same task than without the advanced features of the application. This phenomenon was rationalized from established learning theory from the psychology domain. In a technologically-oriented multimedia field today, we attempted to bring in a user-centred approach of end-user interactions throughout a 3-year development process, and we identified benefits and challenges in trying to align the technical perspectives of novel multimedia features to real-world setting.