This paper documents the planning, design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of the Multimedia Story Builder and Multimedia Story Player – two applications that together are used to create, edit, manage, and deliver web-based multimedia presentations. These applications incorporate simple and intuitive interfaces, extensive functionality, multiple presentation methods, and support for multiple media types, all of which represent improvements over similar systems. The results of a preliminary usability test and suggestions for future testing and development are also described.

The purpose of this study is to explore the representation of national political freedom on web interface design by using power distance, one of the culture dimensions identified by Geert Hofstede, as a measurement. This study also aims to determine if there are any differences between government-based websites and business-oriented websites in representing national political freedom. A pilot study was conducted to validate ten power distance indicators identified from previous research on cultural dimensions with the intent of establishing a measurement for determining a country's national political freedom on web content and interface design. The result showed that six out of ten proposed indicators are valid power distance indicators. The seventh indicator, symmetric layout, demonstrated that its Web representation correlates with national political freedom level. Consequently, the principal research applied these seven indicators in coding 312 websites selected from 39 countries and analyzed national political freedom represented on these websites with content analysis method. The result of two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that large differences exist in web interface design, which in turn reflects the aforementioned national political freedom. The research showed that the mean effect of freedom level between free-country group, partly-free-country group and not-free-country group was statistically significant (p = .003). So was the mean effect of website type between government-based and business-oriented websites (p = .000). Furthermore, the interaction between the freedom level and website type was also significant (p = .041). Therefore, we conclude that web interface design represents a country's political freedom and government-based websites embody more of a nation's authority and supremacy than business-oriented websites do. It is expected that this study furthers our exploration in culture dimensions on web interface design and advances our knowledge in sociological and cultural studies of the web.

Kuriant sistemą, kuri turės sąsają internete, reikia turėti metodiką, kuria būtų galima vadovautis projektuojant šią sąsają. Objektinio projektavimo metoduose ir unifikuotame kūrimo procese RUP (angl. Rational Unified Process) nėra aprašytų specialių procesų interneto sąsajai kurti. Nors šia tema rašė nemažai autorių, tačiau sunku rasti vientisą metodiką, kuria galėtų vadovautis interneto sąsajos ir ja paremtos sistemos kūrėjas. Šiame darbe tiriami esami interneto sistemų sąsajos projektavimo metodai, šablonai bei įvairios kūrimo technologijos, siekiant juos sukonkretizuoti, apibendrinti ir sukurti metodinę medžiagą, kurią būtų galima taikyti interneto sistemas projektuojančioje organizacijoje, mokymo procese ar pateikti kaip gidą, bet kuriam interneto sąsajos projektuotojui. Šiais laikais kompiuteriai dalyvauja daugelyje sričių, ir bendravimas tarp žmogaus ir kompiuterio neišvengiamas. Kad vartotojas galėtų valdyti sistemą, šis bendravimas vyktų sklandžiai, reikalinga sąsaja. Esamos sistemos turi sąsają, tačiau susistemintos metodikos, kaip reikėtų kurti tą sąsają, nėra daug, ji išsklaidyta atskiruose literatūros šaltiniuose ar interneto puslapiuose. Dažnai ši metodika slypi projektuotojų mintyse, bet ji taip ir lieka neaprašyta ir pats sąsajos projektavimas būna intuityvus. / Nowadays, information system creation process consists of several different actions, one of those actions – web interface design. Web interface design process requires a good methodology, to make web interface process better, quicker, flexible and satisfy other web interface design criterions. RUP (Rational Unified Process) don’t present any special creation process of internet web interface. Frequently web interface design process lies in the head of it’s designers. There are no full methodology of web interface design process in one place, only some web interface advices or articles about one or other web interface process steps could be found. The goal of this work is to make a methodology of web interface design and implement it for internet service provider system. Methodology also would be useful for companies which participate in web interface design process, also in school or university study process, or like a guide for any web interface designer. The developed methodology for web interface design was used for implementing internet service provider system web interface, system design process and redesign above-mentioned system web interface for measuring process times. Methodology of web interface design, reduce web interface design process time, help to make web interface design process easier, more flexible and understandable for web interface designer, also certain better web interface appearance independence from system functional part, with possibility to... [to full text]