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How
Usable is Your Web Site?
by Peter Fleck, Copyright © 1999 Peter Fleck is President of PF Hyper, a Web consulting firm. He will be presenting an IICS workshop entitled "Rank Your Site: Evaluating Web Sites for Usability" at the Strictly Business Digital Media Expo, May 26, 11 a.m. He can be reached at pf@pfhyper.com. Peter is co-chair of the IICS Program Committee. According to the Georgia Institute of Technology's GVU Web surveys (http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/), the primary item visitors seek at your Web site is information. Are you helping or hindering that quest? The web is one of the best media for providing information about your products and services. HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the structured language that we use to create Web pages, was designed to make it easy to convey information. But the power of HTML can also be used to turn your Web site into a confusing jumble of pages and to hide the information thoroughly. How usable is your site at presenting important and sought-after information about your company? Can visitors move through quickly to read or retrieve the information they are looking for? Sites suffering from unusability, will call attention to themselves. Visitors will get lost as they browse the site. This article's intention is not to point fingers. Instead, it's hoped that it will help you evaluate the usability of your site. If your site is suffering some of the problems mentioned, be assured that you are not in the minority, and that fixes are not that difficult, in most cases, to implement. The ObviousIf it's usable, the most sought-after information is at the visitor's fingertips. For example, your phone numbers: make sure you are displaying a contact phone number on the home page of your site in a prominent position. You would never publish a brochure without conspicuously displaying your company's phone number. This practice doesn't seem to have much priority on the Web. Multitudes of sites seem predisposed to minimizing contact with their company by hiding their phone numbers on inner pages. It's not a bad idea to have all your contact information displayed on the home page. In fact, consider displaying it on each page, at the bottom in a smaller font size, with copyright info. Other critical information should be easy to find within one click of the home page. (Part of your job, before your Web site is designed, is to know what that information is!) Prices are important. If you have a product, you need to tell people what it costs. That will be a first question on the mind of most of your visitors. If you are not selling direct, you should have a suggested retail price. You might even consider providing the street price. If you are selling over the Net, please make shipping charges easy to find. Provide an estimate up front and don't force your visitor to go through the whole process of ordering just to see what the shipping choices and costs are. Very few sites get this right. Finally, if you are not a direct seller, provide purchasing information for your product. It's easy to forget this if you are the distributor. List where your outlets are located or the URLs to their Web sites. NavigationYour navigation scheme should be like a gentle guide that can direct your visitors throughout your site unobtrusively, giving just the right amount of help when necessary. Part of the thought behind a good navigation scheme involves how you divide the content of your site in the first place. This should be in a hierarchical format so that visitors can follow links within a particular category at your site to get more and more specific information. It may seem logical and helpful to give your visitor as many choices as possible in the form of links to other pages at your site (and the WWW) but generally, this makes actually choosing where to go next difficult. Limiting the choices available helps in guiding the visitor to the information they seek. An easy and very usable design to work with is to simply have your home page contain links to four or five category pages. Each of the categories can be further subcategorized. You provide the visitor with links to all the main category pages and the home page on each of your pages. A familiar page is never far away and the link choices are not overwhelming. Help the visitor navigate within longer pages too -- where they will have to scroll to read the entire text. Give them a link back to the top of the page from the bottom and, depending on the length, you might provide several links to the top throughout the page. If you have subsections on the page, you can provide links from the top directly to the subsections. Send the Info But Please Hold the GraphicsJakob Nielsen predicts that low-end users won't have acceptable Web response times (fast connections to the Web) until 2008 (Alertbox, "'Top Ten Mistakes' Revisited Three Years Later" http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990502.html). When a visitor requests a page from the server that houses your site, the page has to be downloaded from the server to the visitor's computer. A usable page downloads quickly so the visitor can read the valuable information it contains. This should be as obvious as having your phone number on this quickly downloaded page. Pictures are the major speed bumps. They slow down the downloading. Most of these pictures likely aren't worth the wait. Think twice about every single picture on the page and what purpose it serves. Make sure each image is as compressed and small as possible which probably means finding some professional help. Graphics must be optimized for proper Web display and this usually requires image editing software. Pictures are important. They can enhance your site. However, some visitors will not be able to view the pictures (for various reasons including vision problems) so make sure all of the information is available as text. In particular, pictures should have an alternate text description -- called an ALT attribute. Currently, many sites do not utilize ALT even though it has been a part of HTML since the beginning. Try to minimize the number of pictures and their sizes on the home page of your site. You want to grab the visitor's attention immediately with the home page and forcing them to wait for the 100K image of your corporate headquarters to download doesn't succeed at this very well. Linking from the home page to an image of the headquarters is much wiser. In cases where you do need to display a larger image -- a product photo for example -- warn the visitor with a thumbnail that links to the larger display, or a link that describes what will be coming down the pipe. Broken LinksBroken links are like broken windows on a building -- they make your site look like it's not maintained. The first question the visitor will ask is: "Does the owner ever visit this site?" Broken image links are horribly obvious and unnecessary. Fix them fast. Links to other pages at your site that don't work impede navigation and will likely result in the visitor leaving since they can't get to page they want to browse. Check all the links at your site regularly and make sure they work or remove them. Software -- some of it free -- is available for checking links and creating a report. Let It BleedJava, JavaScript, and the various plug-in technologies that add animation, interactivity, and "whiz-bang" to your pages all have their place in the Web universe but it is too early to rely on them as the only method to convey information. Make sure to offer alternative pages that don't include these new technologies. Both Java and JavaScript can be turned off in the visitor's browser settings. Java has also had many versions and it's possible for visitors with older browsers, that use older "Java Virtual Machines," to end up with frozen computers or crashed programs. Plug-ins will often require the user to go somewhere else, download software, and possibly troubleshoot why it then doesn't work. With at least 5 million sites on the Web, why would anyone want to spend the time doing this at your site? They will move on to friendlier territory. This is not to say that these new technologies shouldn't be tried. The key is to warn the visitor about the technologies and what they may need to see them displayed and to also present the information in an alternative format. Why Web Site Are Unusable: Theories On Why Sites Are Poorly Built
Web designers with background and training in designing for computer screens are hard to find. Most of them come from the print world. Many of these former print designers don't recognize how the print world is different from the Web world. Design for a printed piece is "frozen" and then printed. If someone finds that the text on the printed material is too small to read, they are not able to change the size of the type. Web design and display doesn't work this way. If the text is too small, the visitor can change the size of the type, drastically altering the original design. Also changeable at the visitor's end are font faces, sizes, and colors; background colors; and browser window width. Any or all of these can destroy the designer's design. Some designers see this as a battle and will do everything in their power to stop the visitor from changing the look of the page. They are destined to lose. HTML, our presentation language, and the Web itself were designed with user adjustments in mind. Design for Web pages should be a suggestion and not a mandate. Now add in the fact that most of your visitors are using one of the two major browsers and each one can display pages differently from the other. The harder the designer tries to achieve a particular design and "freeze" it in one browser; the more likely the page will look different when accessed with the other browser. The browser version (Netscape 2.0 or Netscape 4.0, for example) can also affect display. This inherent flexibility and user-centeredness of the Web is really an advantage. It allows a Web site to be equally accessible to a blind person as to a sighted person. At least this will work if the designer and developer know what they are doing. And this brings us to a second reason why the Web is in the shape it's in today and that's bad HTML. HTML is seductively simple. There are relatively few developers and designers that really know the language well and many tools for creating Web pages that create the pages with incorrect HTML. If a designer or developer is sloppy and there are HTML coding mistakes on their pages, often the browser will still manage to display it. However, the other major browser might not display it correctly or as intended, and the next version of a browser might display it differently or not at all. If a designer and/or developer takes the time to learn the syntax of the language and write what is referred to as "well-formed" HTML, the display will be far more consistent no matter what sort of software is accessing the page. ConclusionIn one of Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox columns ("Failure of Corporate Websites", http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981018.html), he provides some figures from Forrester Research that estimate the cost of "bad Web design." This includes the loss of approximately 50% of potential sales as people "can't find stuff," and losing "repeat visits from 40% of the users who do not return to a site when their first visit resulted in a negative experience." If your site suffers from some of the problems mentioned in this article, you may be losing sales and visits. Your site is not alone: many, maybe even the majority, of the sites on the WWW also suffer from more than one. The solution is to take the time to evaluate your site, assess its usability, and then to implement the changes necessary to make www.yourcompany.com usable and well-designed. .Peering into the Communicator's Future by Earl C. Joseph, Futurist
When looking into the future, I find that many opportunities exist
for communications professionals because of advances in technology.
Some evolve the profession while others introduce new directions
requiring new skills. Thus the communicator's role is expanding
on multiple fronts, including the following: . Remember groupware? Two years ago products such as Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise and Collabra Share, designed to facilitate communication and workflow on conventional LANs and WANs, were sliding towards obsolescence. The focus was on all-powerful web browsers that provided access to the Internet and erased distinctions between computer operating systems and network platforms. Today groupware is back, adapted to a web environment and loaded with features that integrate browser technology into virtually every aspect of business operations. E-mail, calendar and scheduling, electronic conferencing, document management, project workflow, discussion forums; the latest versions of popular groupware programs control it all, forming the backbone of intranets and customer-oriented "extranets." This groupware renaissance spells great opportunity for multimedia developers and designers. As intranet fever spreads—the worldwide market for intranets is expected to hit $8 billion by 1999, according to Zona Research of Redwood, Calif.—demand for professionals who can install, customize and maintain groupware will grow exponentially. The wonderful thing about groupware is that you don't have to be a code wizard to excel in the field. "Off-the-shelf" programs such as Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise and Netscape SuiteSpot take care of the grunt work, letting you concentrate on more important matters such as satisfying the client's needs and controlling costs. "A lot of things are built in," says IICS member Dawn Sherman, an intranet consultant with Merrill Corporation in St. Paul. "All developers have to do is modify certain parameters, certain preferences that a client needs." This article surveys the current crop of Web-wise groupware programs, takes a look at how companies in the Twin Cities and elsewhere are using them to slash operating costs and boost efficiency, and indulges in some speculation about the future of groupware and Web technology in general. .
Seward Learning Systems has just completed a computer based training program that uses video as part of the instructional strategy. This article discusses our experience designing, creating, and incorporating the video into the Welcome to the Family Advocacy Program CBT. Project Background
The Family Advocacy Program (FAP) seeks to prevent and treat domestic abuse within the Air Force. Each of the 85 Air Force bases around the world has a FAP office staffed by one or more employees. In the past, employees at the various bases have flown to FAP Headquarters in San Antonio for training, but budget cuts have now ruled this out. Consequently, FAP Headquarters staff explored various delivery systems and selected computer-based training for their new employee orientation. Headquarters staff wanted the CBT to introduce the FAP program to new employees and to train them on procedures for dealing with an abuse incident or a family at-risk for abuse. In addition, Headquarters staff requested that the CBT teach employees about their individual roles and responsibilities. When we were designing an instructional strategy to meet these goals, Seward Learning Systems decided to use scenarios to teach the procedures and the roles and responsibilities. We further decided that videos would be a perfect way to enhance the scenarios. Anita, the overall project manager, had anticipated that we would want videos in the CBT and had already budgeted to make this possible.
Why Use Video?
First of all, we used videos to establish the scenarios, to provide what is known as a situated learning context. Situated cognition theory maintains that learning occurs when the learner is actively engaged in lifelike experience. Meaningful learning, which is defined as knowledge that easily transfers to real life, takes place more readily when the learning experience is situated in a rich and lifelike setting that is reflective of real world contexts. Following this theory, we used videos to establish a realistic problem situation. In the first scenario, the video depicts an argument between an enlisted man and his wife over money. The video ends with the husband pushing the wife down and seeing her hit her head on the pavement. The second scenario starts with a very young couple dealing with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy that they see as cramping their fun. Both videos depict real-life problems and introduce characters that we follow throughout the rest of the scenario (through photos, audio, and text). In addition to situating the learning, the opening videos attract the learners' attention and motivate them to follow the scenario to see what happens and how FAP handles these families. We also used videos later on in the scenarios to model behavior. One video shows an intake interview in which the social worker interviews the abuse victim (the pushed wife). This video models how the social worker should interact with a victim to make her feel comfortable, to build a relationship of trust, and to get information that will help him determine what happened and how best to treat the family. Another video models how the nurse interacts with the at-risk pregnant couple to gain their trust and establish her role as educator. My Role as Instructional
Designer To start, I decided where to use video segments, based how they could best convey the content and set up the scenario. I then scripted the videos, considering how the scenario would flow out of and into the various videos. Script Writing
Because the videos were so short, the director suggested that I write up descriptions of the characters to help the actors. I also described motivations, moods, and clothing and summarized the scenarios, so the actors understood the context. Choosing
Locations Casting
Shooting
Reviewing Edited
Tapes Costs
Some expenses to keep in mind when budgeting for video include: casting agency, talent (actors/actresses), director, production crew and equipment, location fees (and possible location scout fees), and editing. Also investigate costs that may arise if you need to reshoot scenes or call actors back for any other reason. We found when we called the union talent back to do 2 hours of photography that we had to pay them for a full day. Directing Video
for Multimedia What to Expect
at a Video Shoot The crew arrived at 7:30 a.m. and started setting up lights. (The crew consisted of two lighting guys, the sound technician, the shooter (photographer), and the make-up artist/tape coordinator. For the outside shoots, the production company had rented a portable generator that they towed behind a truck. A second big truck held all the lighting and camera gear and served as a changing room. The talent arrived at 8:30 and consulted with me, the director, and the makeup artist as to what they should wear (they brought a selection of their own clothes that fit my written criteria for the character). They dressed and rehearsed. We then shot a few practice rounds, while the director and I looked at the video monitor to see how the scene looked on screen. The director shot about 10 takes of each scene from a long angle. Then he shot about 10 takes with close-ups of the two actors. It took about 2-3 hours to shoot a one or two minute scene--and the crew told me that was fast! Stamina is definitely an essential attribute for a director! Compressing and
Digitizing Video If possible, start with a Beta master of the video. This is the format professionals for its richer data format and clearer picture. However, with this format, you will need specialized equipment to read the video. Because we didn't have a Beta deck, we sent our video to Rich Reardon at the University of Minnesota Media Resources center to digitize. This cost approximately $150.00. Before digitizing,
you should know the: Compressing video involves making choices on how to allocate your bandwidth. Basically you have to make tradeoffs between frame rate, image quality, and sound quality. If you want completely smooth movement you will have to sacrifice picture quality. These decisions depend in part on the nature of your video. If you have a lot of movement in the video, you will want to enhance the smoothness of the movement, trading off clarity of image. Luckily you can get away with a fuzzier image when you have movement because the human eye expects it. In fact, animators deliberately blur images to convey movement. If your video is more static, you will want better picture clarity. In addition, if you have music in the video, you may need to sacrifice elsewhere to meet the high bandwidth requirements of high fidelity sound. As may be apparent from this brief discussion from a novice, compressing video is an art as much as a science and well worth getting someone with experience to do. .
The Project
Blue Moon Productions was contracted to produce an educational video for elementary students throughout the region in both rural and urban districts. Also, Blue Moon was to produce an interactive multimedia program for promotional and public relations purposes, primarily for adults to use in settings such as the MSGA Minnesota State Fair booth. We chose the CDi format. The Team
The Challenges
One of the biggest technical challenges was to find a way for each video clip to lead back tothye interactive graphic menu. The graphics which went to video and were MPEG coded looked very different than those that were displayed as straight graphic files. We don't suggest trying to mix them. We ended up having to simplify our approach and not try to make the graphics off of video match that of the graphic files. Another complication was encountered one week before the one-off was due. The program's attraction loop was created in illustrations assembled in Director 5.0. Our team ran into many problems converting the director files to a format that would play smoothly on the CDi. This experience proved to us that the conversion process can be very tricky and calls for a lot of extra time and tweaking. The Strategies
The Insights
When shooting video for CDi go for the locked down, no zoom, no hand-held look. Otherwise your pictures can look a little scary. The CDi format is great for playing video clips, but the options in programming are limited. Therefore, the creative treatment and structure have to be kept simple. The Difference
The MSGA CDi contains about 50 video clips that are accessed through a tree-type structure starting with 5 main categories. What we created was a mini-encyclopedia of information on the soybean. Kind of a Cliff notes version. The challenge was to make the segments short, interesting and complete on their own. This required careful thought in the creative planning/script-writing stage. Also, the audience for the CDi was the general public, which is broader than the audience for most videos. Elements of the CDi need to appeal to people with a wide variety of interests and ages. .
Our MMRT SIG met at The Learning Company in February to discuss various DVD capabilities and implementations. We were treated to a variety of demos and then we broke out into individual sessions with TLC staff at their various workstations. This was a unique opportunity. Where else but at MMRT? Monthly MMRT meetings are posted on our distributed calendar. For interactive communicators thinking about getting into DVD production, we explored some of the new job descriptions and their skills: Designing for stereo is analogous to designing sound for a stage play in an acoustically dead room -- the sound comes from in front of the listener. "5.1 sound" is realistic and compelling because sound comes from four corners around the listener, from front and center, and from powerful, essentially non-directional bass transducers (sub-woofers).
For more on DVD,
scroll on down to the following two articles in this section. To investigate
the DVD authoring process further, there are excellent articles at
the Sonic
Solutions website.
Digital Video
Disk: A Look Through The Crystal Ball Convergence has become the central focus in the debate over whether digital versatile disk, or DVD, will usher in a future where personal computers and television become seamless and interchangeable parts of home entertainment systems. DVD is the first real medium capable of playing back information on both televisions and PCs, as well as recording data on both appliances. Today, you can buy a movie and watch it on a DVD video player, or on your computer with the help of a DVD drive and an additional piece of hardware. Tomorrow you'll be able to record your favorite shows from digital television signals onto a DVD disk or use that same disk to back up your hard drive. You'll be able to upgrade a DVD game by visiting a Web site through your television set's Internet connection and download a compact disk to your DVD-RAM or DVD Video recorder. That all falls into the category of "maybe someday." But what's likely to happen soon, say a few years out? Technology's a hard thing to predict but we took on the challenge, anyway, and gathered information and experts to give us a glimpse of the near future. Wolfgang Schlichting, a senior analyst with International Data Corporation outside Boston, says the first level of convergence will be in the consumer media, where movies can be played on both PCs and television sets. The second level of convergence will involve games, although he believes most games will still require computing power only available now with a PC. The higher levels, more than two years away, will center on recording home videos or taking digital shots, editing them on your computer and then watching them on your television without having $20,000 worth of equipment. While uncertain whether it will ever be reached, he says total convergence will involve a central DVD player with a DVD, CD and CD-ROM library as well as Net and cable/satellite television access all hooked into your home entertainment center. Hardware Dataquest, a San Jose, California-based market research firm, predicts DVD will become a standard PC drive in 1999, when per unit price for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) drops below $100 per unit. Dataquest expects 63 million DVD drives worldwide will be shipped in PCs by the year 2000. Analysts say early adopters will snap up PC DVD drives now available at prices starting at $500 but the general consumer market will only consider upgrading their CD-ROM drives when prices drop below $300 a unit, which could happen as soon as the end of this year or the first quarter of 1998, according to Wen Liao, senior analyst with New York-based Jupiter Communications. Currently, DVD hardware comes in two flavors: DVD-ROM and DVD Video. The DVD-ROM plays both DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. The few DVD-ROM titles available generally fall into the gaming category, although you can expect a burgeoning number of multiple disk CD-ROM titles repackaged as one DVD-ROM appearing throughout this year. Hitachi was scheduled to release an internal and external DVD-RAM, an erasable variant of DVD, in June at prices ranging from $794 to $953. Pioneer is also promoting DVD-RAM models. Meanwhile, DVD-RAM disks will have a capacity of 2.7 GB and another incarnation, DVD-R (write once, not erasable), will have 3.9 GB disks. The price of DVD-RAM and DVD-R disks have not been announced, but Schlichting says Maxell will begin selling them this year. You may recall CD-ROM rewritables, called CD-RWs, have only just begun to have a presence on the market. Now you'll have a choice and my sense is DVD will quickly overcome CD-RW. DVD Video
DVD Video players can be purchased at prices ranging from $500 to $700 but they come with a drawback -- you can't record with them yet. Liao says the earliest a DVD video recorders are at least two to three years off. Developers are waiting for standards to emerge for digital television before designing DVD-Video recordable disks. As Schlichting points outs, there's little reason to record an analog television signal on a digital medium. The technological challenge of recordable DVD Video remains daunting. The Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA) reports the systems to create MPEG compressed video costs $250,000 and take several passes and multiple hours just to get one movie recorded. Since reducing these systems into a $250 DVD Video recorder appears unlikely, the DVD recorders which eventually connect to your television will have a different compression standard than the current DVD-Video format and will probably not provide the same sharpness and recording time as DVD-Video discs. At least they'll look much better than VHS-recorded programs you're now using. Another problem with recordable DVD-Video involves copyright and encryption issues which still need to be resolved. Hollywood studios are frightened that someone like you who has a DVD movie the equivalent of a perfect master tape might use a DVD-Video recorder to allow 10 friends to tape it. Developers claim to have encryption technologies to prevent such a possibility but Hollywood still sees home tapers as a threat. Moreover, since this technology moves so quickly, any prediction on recordable DVD-Video could change by, say, tomorrow. The technical issues involved in recordable DVD-Video could eventually reach a point where the recorded picture replicates the source material perfectly, but don't count on it happening within two years. Of course, you also can watch DVD-Video on your computer now as long as you install a special DVD MPEG video decoder and a Dolby AC-3 audio decoder costing less than $100 for both. Audio DVD
The convergence of video and audio requires all hi-fi companies to agree to the 1394 standard and to a scenario where all the electronic apparatus will evaporate and "there will be only sources and destinations and a user interface, which enables you to make your selection." Stevens predicts a 24 to 36 month wait before convergence begins to happen. Stevens may be an optimistic. But you know the cliche: your guess is as good as mine. The media has been giving DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) a lot of attention lately. DVDs are the discs that can play an entire feature length movie from one side. But it is DVD ROM, the computer-based version, that may have the greatest impact on the work many of us do. What is DVD ROM? Does it really exist? Will it change the way we design and develop multimedia training? How long will it be before our clients are equipped with DVD ROM drives? These are the questions that have been occupying many of us for more than a year. Well, after some serious reading, web research, and trade show investigations, I am here to report that it is still not possible to get a straight answer to many of these questions. However, I did find some interesting information and I will gladly share my findings about DVD ROM and its potential impact on our field. Let's begin with the most basic question: What is DVD ROM? The answer: It's a high capacity (4.7 GB minimum on a 12 cm disc), high throughput (equivalent to a 12 speed CD ROM drive), read-only, optical disc. Basically, that means compared to a CD ROM it will hold much more data and transfer it much faster to the computer. From the end-user's perspective, it's a technology that has the potential to do to CD ROM what CD ROM did to 3.5 inch diskettes. It could make them all but obsolete as a medium for storing and disseminating software. That said, it should be noted that most DVD ROM drives will also read your CD ROMs and audio CDs. This new technology combines many of the best features of videodisc and CD ROM. The large capacity and high throughput of DVD are ideal for storage and playback of data intensive formats such as audio and video. In addition, the optical format allows for "instant" searches and "seamless" video branching. Do DVD ROM drives really exist? That's a hard one to prove if seeing is believing. Drives have been available in Japan for some time now and they are being shown at trade shows, but we are still not seeing them available through the normal outlets in the US. Indications are, however, that drives will be available to consumers in the very near future. DVD ROM technology is real, functional, affordable (less than $500 for a drive), and desirable (from a technical perspective). However, as with many innovations it is taking longer for the product to make it to the consumer. The reasons are simple and familiar. We've seen this scenario with numerous other technologies. How do you get consumers to abandon the comfort they have just attained with their recent investment in CD ROMs? It will require time, money and mental effort to adopt this new technology. And, at the moment, it has few products to offer as lures. To add to dilemma, how do you get developers to create products for a platform that has few consumers? What effects will this new technology have on the design of multimedia training? I don't foresee designs changing as much as media and methods. DVD ROM offers the ability to re-purpose huge libraries of existing videos and to produce new performance improvement scenarios that make use of truly interactive video. Seamless branching will allow for the creation of complex learning situations that offer multiple paths for learning experiences. In summary, DVD ROM is an emerging optical disc technology with the potential to replace CD ROM as the predominant medium for the storage and dissemination of software. Within months, consumers in the US should begin to see an extensive marketing effort undertaken to introduce this technology. For more information on DVD ROM take a look at the January, 1997, issue of e-Media professional, or visit http://www.nbeng.com. Greg Sales is President of Seward Learning Systems, Inc. He can be reached at 612-721-4444 or GCSales@SewardLS.com. The Great DV
Migration Bent on dominating virtually every arena of personal computing, Microsoft has set its sights on desktop video, an exploding market that until recently was the near-exclusive domain of the Apple Macintosh. The projections of industry pundits are startling: within five years virtually all non-linear editing will be done on Windows NT. Systems such as Avid and Media 100, having cut their teeth and matured into powerful multi-media tools on the Mac OS, will have migrated to NT, following the lead of other top-flight DV packages such as D-Vision Online, In:sync Speed-Razor, 3D Studio MAX and Lightwave 3D. If the experts are right, video producers and animators accustomed to working on Macs face tough choices:
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