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Media content

7 September, 2015 - 12:26

The last aspect of external design that we’ll cover is media content design. This refers to the design of applications whose main purpose is to convey information to the application users, whether it be products for sale, press releases, academic articles or similar content.

Media content can be in several different forms: text, still images, animations, video or audio, or any combination of the three. Designing the content and the presentation of the information is the affair of communications specialists. Your responsibility as a system designer is primarily to provide for the storage and retrieval of each component as needed. You must also decide how the media content will be maintained (say, by changing the photographs when a product is modified) and how to ensure that all the navigation links available to the user work correctly. It is easy to radically modify the content of a page; it may not be so easy to locate all the other pages that point to the one you’ve modified, to see whether those links still make sense. It is even worse when you suppress a page without suppressing the links to it, leaving the user high and dry in the middle of navigating the web.