How Adobe Bridge helps metadata users
By Carmel Tse/October, 2019
University of Maryland LDT 100 Project
Link to the Adobe Bridge metadata help site
I have always been an advocate for the tagging of media assets used in instructional design with IPTC metadata. The practice allows for the easy tracking of asset information, in particular copyright data. There are different methods and tools to achieve the task. One useful tool is Adobe Bridge as it provides a graphic application program interface as well as very comprehensive metadata sets and templates. Unlike other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite, Bridge is a freeware. Once the software is downloaded and installed on the computer, the “Help” menu will lead to the user guide’s gateway page.
The gateway page is an html page on the Adobe Help Cloud, which in itself is a cognitive overload of information and knowledge. The Cloud also hosts blogs contributed by the Adobe user community. Solutions offered by other users are sometimes helpful, but often outdated or misleading. Just like the world wide web, It’s like a maze of more rumors than facts.
For novice learners, it’s better to stick with the official Adobe guide. On the landing page of the Adobe Bridge User Guide, there are 12 gates to choose from, and inside each gate there are more gates nested.
The particular chapter on how to work with metadata is found under the Work with assets gate on the main help page, which in itself has 16 more nested gates.
Adobe deploys some very important tools in cognitive load:
• Signaling: The headings serve as good keywords.
• Segmenting: It divided up contents in chunks.
Room for improvement
• There is no matching modality: No videos or audios at all to show how to do evolving tasks.
• Overall very good revision compared to previous Adobe Help pages and 100 times better than latest Microsoft Help.
• Some weeding of unnecessary information on the gateway page will be helpful.
• PDF version contains some varying information compared with live html page.
Bibliography
Sweller J (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science 12, 257-285.
www.learning-theories.com/cognitive-theory-of-multimedia-learning-mayer.html Retrieved 1 November, 2019
Gateway page comments
Fonts: Information is presented in clear text, black on white, with some headlines in blue.
Print: A 90-page PDF textbook is available for download. You really have to like it to read it.
Navigation: A sidebar appears on left of screen providing topic searches. However, sub-topics are not visible unless clicked on a topic. It took me some time to find my topic on metadata.
Main: The main display area on the right carries some important but lesser searched information.
Scalability: The page is device responsive, but once displayed on a narrow mobile device, the main display information is omitted, but the topic list remains.
Topic page comments
interTopic: Work with metadata in Adobe Bridge
Fonts: Same scheme as gateway page.
Print: No. But you can use the one you download at the gateway page
Navigation: A navigation sidebar now appears on the right instead of left for searches on the page. I supposed Adobe wants to avoid confusing users with the gateway navigation. It took a while to switch the focus.
Scalability: The page is device responsive, but once displayed on a narrow mobile device, all information remains with topics appeared at the top. Content: Adhesion to cognitive load ground rules. Information is segmented into tasks, with how-to guides limited to 1 to 6 steps, clearly numbered.