Multimedia Workshop: Enhancing usability in multimedia authoring with a visual scripting language

This thesis builds upon the benefits of three areas: multimedia, user-interface design and visual programming. Multimedia Workshop is a prototype for a multimedia authoring environment which provides a well-designed user-interface for its high-end multimedia programming tool and a visual scripting language. We expect the design to prove far more usable than existing multimedia authoring tools.;Textual scripting languages of current authoring environments are difficult to use and require programming experience to code significant functionality. A visual scripting language may reduce the complexity of scripting, and in particular, we are interested in how a visual scripting language can simplify the multimedia programming task. We propose a visual scripting language to help bridge the usability gap between the multimedia programming environment and its scripting language by cognitively simplifying the scripting task. Visual programming languages can be easier and faster to program in than textual languages, and visual code can be easier to understand.;We attempt consistency in Multimedia Workshop so the user of Multimedia Workshop can form a single mental model for the entire application. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...