Design of multimedia services

This paper addresses the fundamentals of multimedia service design. It draws on contemporary experience with the design and delivery of large-scale multimedia services to present a comprehensive treatment of the total design process, from initial ideas through to the detailed design of individual applications. It draws an essential difference between service design, which embodies the commercial rationale, business opportunity and technology exploitation, and application creation which is the design and creation of the applications comprising the service. The critical dependencies of hardware platform, user interface functionality and application style guide are discussed and essential guidelines provided. Application design is comprehensively covered with attention given to the issues of media design and display, user interface consistency and usability.