Annotating Video

What We Did
Video is increasingly feasible on the Web. Played in Flash, video can be accompanied by instructional annotations, a kind of running commentary in text as well as other interactions such as questions and quizzes posed at intervals or at the end. The challenge becomes adding such rich content around video in an affordable way.

This tool allows the content expert to write annotations directly to the video, entering text and questions and setting the timing of each in one pass. This results in more appropriate annotations than we would get from someone writing in Word for an imagined interface. It also reduces hand-offs, labor and QA. The data is stored as XML and the application can import standard formats such as Quicktime Closed Captioning scripts.

Pictured above is the authoring tool. We also created a player with a much simpler interface allowing students to control the video, see the annotations and answer the questions.

Interaction Design Services
• Initial Design, Specification and Prototype
• Interface Design and Graphic Design
• Coding
• Extensive QA and Usability Testing