Evolution of Encarta

1¾   «        ÒA  † ‘ ‘ ’ “ “                                                                   ”                               The Evolution of Encarta 

by David Beckman 

David Beckman lives in Redmond, Washington 

If Microsoft's Multimedia developers had any doubts about the importance of their work on a new generation of CD-ROM based encyclopedia, they may have been exorcised by the spirit of a dead American warrior.

During a January 1992 gathering of the software giant's multimedia group, the image of General Douglas MacArthur appeared in the darkened meeting room, steely-eyed, the jaw with its patrician set, standing arrow straight in his trademark general's cap and crisp khaki uniform. Mac's voice resonated through the final lines of his farewell speech, "...old soldiers never die; they just fade away..."

The apparition was summoned by Microsoft's Craig Bartholomew, the project or "program" manager for a new electronic multimedia encyclopedia code-named Gandalf. Bartholomew projected sample screen images, coupled with sound, on the meeting room's large screen to demonstrate to the gathering how sound and image can enhance text articles. The presentation aimed to show how these elements, in an encyclopedia article, could result in a total greater than the sum of its parts, that the topics could very nearly come to life.

Indelible Impressions

It made an indelible impression on this audience of multimedia pioneers. It confirmed their hope that they were onto something significant that could improve the method and pace of the way people absorb information, something that could blaze the way for multimedia computing. Unlike the old soldier, those impressions did not fade away.

Just over one year later, the team completed an exhaustive drive to bring Encarta to market. The ship date targeted for sometime in early March marked the end of a six-year effort to develop a full-featured, interactive CD-ROM-based encyclopedia designed to work with the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system. The single-disc product was framed around the text of the 29-volume Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia; but its publishers would barely recognize it. Encarta contains over 14,000 media elements -- including more than 5,000 photographs, scores of illustrations, maps, and over 100 animations -- all easily accessible from either the articles or through Encarta's "Gallery" feature. Hundreds of computer science and pop culture articles have been added to the Funk and Wagnalls text. Even the readability of the text itself has been improved. For example, Encarta expands into full words abbreviations that appeared in the printed text.

The inclusion of over seven hours of high-quality 16-bit (as opposed to lower quality 8-bit) sound represents another of Encarta's many firsts. More than 180 examples of music from around the world, 46 foreign language samples, hundreds of nature and wild animal sounds, scores of literary readings and speeches, and hundreds of jazz and classical music samples make up the audio portion of Encarta.

The product's editorial team wrote more than 10,000 original captions. They also developed an illustrated timeline of world history with topics that "pop" open when selected to give important historical information from the time of the earth's creation to modern times. More compelling, thousands of cross references are linked within the topics, allowing the reader to jump to related topics with the click of a mouse button. One can easily import information from the text or timeline into a word processing document to make report writing easier.

Encyclopedia critic Ken Kister, the author of Best Encyclopedias, said Encarta is a significant advance in the development of multimedia encyclopedias.

"The makers of Encarta have -- happily -- placed great emphasis on user convenience, control, and access," Kister wrote after viewing a preliminary version of the product. "The user interface is much improved over other electronic encyclopedias," he said. Kister added that such an interface is what is needed to spur consumers to purchase multimedia products, and "Encarta meets this test with flying colors."

Encarta's Origins 

Encarta's origins date back to 1986, when Microsoft began to explore possibilities of building new reference products using the vast storage capabilities of CD-ROM. But those aspirations did not evolve beyond the conceptual stage for another two years. Visual designer Carolyn Bjerke joined Microsoft's multimedia group in 1988 to help conceive the "look" of an electronic encyclopedia. Bjerke said she spent several hours each day for nearly two years brainstorming ideas with an editor, a project manager, a technical advisor and a marketing manager. That project, which became known as Merlin, was designed in those sessions -- sketched out on butcher paper that was unrolled and hung along the walls of a conference room.

"We came up with three or four radically different, really far-out ideas that had nothing to do with what could be done technically at that point," she said; but they had the support of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates to proceed with the project. The concept team managed to convince Gates that their efforts had paid off in results, the most important of which was an understanding of an effective electronic encyclopedia design that put the user in control.

Still, Merlin continued to languish in the conceptual stage. The software tools needed for its creation did not yet exist. While team members remained optimistic, some within and outside the team feared the project was simply too much to take on.

"At that point, people thought that building an encyclopedia was just too big a project, that it wouldn't get done," said Craig Bartholomew, who developed a strong interest in the project late in 1990. At this time, Bartholomew was the product manager for Microsoft's Bookshelf project. Bartholomew said he found the prospect of developing a full-featured multimedia encyclopedia attractive and challenging.

"I didn't have a particular vision for it at first," he admits. Such a vision, he said, should come from what computer users need, not what a software company tells them they need. "I thought it would look a lot like Bookshelf, since that was a product I was familiar with. I didn't think there would be anything particularly fancy about it at first. I just thought it would be a good idea to get a Microsoft encyclopedia out into the marketplace, and gradually improve it over time."

Bartholomew wrote a new proposal for the project in early 1991, which the team dubbed Gandalf. The 40-page proposal detailed market and developmental opportunities. It argued well for the future of multimedia products and convinced Gates the project deserved more development. Gates went to Microsoft's board of directors for money to fund Gandalf; and Bartholomew moved from Bookshelf to lead the new project. By the fall of 1991, developers completed an electronic text-only version of the Funk & Wagnalls' text that was "fully searchable," and production began.

Bartholomew hired Sara Fox, whose background included work on educational products in both videodisc and CD-ROM formats. Fox's task was to spearhead the editorial effort, which included hiring a small staff of editors to read the most prominent 10,000 of the text's 25,000 articles. The editors classified the images, sounds, and animations with which to illustrate the articles. While all possessed solid backgrounds in their fields, few could be classified as experts.

No Experts

"We didn't necessarily want what some people might call 'experts' for this task," said Bartholomew. "We didn't want a point of view that was overly snobbish or overly academic. We were really looking for smart, creative people with a good educational background in a given subject area and a curiosity to imagine what a typical person who used this product would want to see or hear." Bartholomew believes the experiment paid off. "I'd say it worked very well. When I look at the quality and distribution of our media, I'd say we look better than any other electronic encyclopedia. But our customers will judge that, not me."

One of the few exceptions to the rule was Jon Kertzer, a former Seattle radio host and ethnomusicologist who once worked for CBS Records. Kertzer's job was to track down items like obscure wild animal sounds and early recordings of speeches or music originally made on wax cylinders -- all elements requested by the editors to accompany the images and articles. Some audio elements came through connections he has formed around the world, like the British Broadcasting Corporation's nature sound library. Others came by chance. Kertzer said he heard about a Los Angeles sound archivist's collection of 60,000 tapes from a radio program he listened to while driving to work. He said he called the archivist as soon as he arrived; and much of the historical audio in Encarta ended up coming from that collection. For speeches or readings that preceded the age of recording, Kertzer hired professional actors.

Testing

During the building of Gandalf, Bartholomew moved the initial designs and each program modification through Microsoft's Usability Testing Lab to see how potential users would react to features in the product. Susan Denning oversaw testing of the first prototype in September 1991.

"Some ideas flew; some didn't," Denning said. Nonetheless, it produced valuable feedback for the development team. Test users tended to confuse what was then the search feature with another feature referred to as the index; so they adjusted label names and functions. In a subsequent test, Denning said, subjects used the newly designed Category Browser as a search feature, which "was a bit of a surprise, but not necessarily a problem." The various features of the encyclopedia eventually allowed users to navigate with whichever method they felt most comfortable using.

During the tests, they tested parents along with, then separated from, their children. The dual testing allowed for certain advantages, Denning said. Children felt more relaxed with parents, then felt more confident during their own tests after they were separated. Both groups showed different methods of working with Gandalf. While adults seemed more hesitant than their children, they proved to be more "encyclopedia aware." Children, on the other hand, compared the multimedia aspects of Gandalf to television, which, according to Denning, is positive. "There is a theory that kids will not learn unless they are being entertained, because of the media that they have grown up with," she said.

Based upon the results of usability and focus group testing that included interviews with about 300 parents, teachers, and children, the project's core team began to re-examine the user interface. Bartholomew, Bjerke, Fox, and programmers Kevin Gammill and Jay Gibson met daily during the months of October and November 1991 to re-design the product based on the results of usability testing. The design of the product grew more and more ambitious, with very few ties back to the current generation of CD-ROM reference products. Concerns arose over where and when media would appear, how the search function should work, even which fonts to use. The team then presented the new design to Gates later in November. Gates liked what he saw; and production work began in January 1992.

Hard Challenges

The editorial team also faced hard challenges. Beyond the standard types of visual media used in print encyclopedias, such as photographs, illustrations, charts, and maps, the editors were instructed to prod their imaginations to conceive new ways of supporting the text. Animation served to illustrate how bees communicate. The article on the Doppler Effect also used animation in an anecdotal, entertaining way to explain the principles of physics. Slightly different techniques animate historical maps: showing troop movements on battlefields, the routes of the Crusades, and those of famous explorers. Excerpts of voice recordings accompanied portraits of famous figures from history or literature to try to recreate a sense of first hand experience or "being there."

But the sheer volume of media took longer to evaluate than originally anticipated. Shipping dates had to be rescheduled as the time to assemble the thousands of elements dragged out. Image editor Carrie Seglin had to procure tens of thousands of photographs from photo houses in the U.S. and Europe. The staff then had to evaluate the images individually for how they would appear on a computer screen. Locating each of the hundreds of arcane samples of voice recordings and music that had been requested took longer than originally planned. 

All illustrations, animations, and maps were created with computers rather than on paper, the traditional format in publishing. These pioneering efforts of working with so much information in a fully-computerized environment required a steep learning curve. Even with fast, well-developed software tools created specifically for the purpose of inserting the thousands of images and sounds into the electronic text, the overwhelming volume of information and scores of corrections dragged the effort behind. Editors racked up hundreds of hours of overtime to keep the pace. Initial test versions or "builds" were rough. Occasionally, images showed up in the wrong places, as when an initial proofreading pass turned up a photo of the late country singer Hank Williams in an article about Apple Computer's chairman and CEO John Sculley. The editors quickly corrected this error.

Still, near the end of 1992, as all other production work was completed, a team of programmers, testers, proofreaders, and a program manager continued to push the project toward completion. A significant portion of this final work involved "testing" or quality assurance. Begun back in the Spring of 1992, this seemed like an endless round of trying to "break" the program on all PCs, displays, and software combinations. This led to round after round of fixing or "debugging" Encarta. By early 1993, this fanatic Microsoft quest for "unbreakable" software drew to a close, finally allowing the team to "ship" or finish Encarta.

What's In a Name?

As people see and hear more about Encarta, many ask where the name "Encarta" comes from. In the spring of 1992, members of the project's marketing team searched for a name under which Gandalf could go to market -- a name that was not already protected by copyright. Product Marketing Manager Sonja Gustafson went on the road to test certain names with focus groups. While members of those groups suggested several good names for the product, most were already in use and protected by trademark. Microsoft then consulted a Seattle company which specializes in creating company names. Ultimately, this company used a computer program to conceive the moniker, "Encarta."

"It doesn't actually mean anything," said Gustafson. "It's what it invokes, such as Magna Carta, or suggestions of an encyclopedia, that drew us to this name. As one reviewer noted, Encarta connotes vast, unexplored vistas."

To sum up Encarta, Susan Denning of Microsoft's Usability Testing Lab says that the beauty of Encarta is that it offers three or four different ways of processing information, so users will find the information easier to learn. "Whether you are a visual learner, or an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner, you'll have a better chance of assimilating the information," she said. "Encarta will probably have something for every kind of learner, because it brings everything to one place. I think that is the main advantage that it offers."

Work Under Way on New Edition

Microsoft's Encarta team has now moved on to the next annual release of the product. They bet that all of their long hours of anticipating customer needs and pursuing high quality control have resulted in a product that will appeal to generation after generation of learners of all types. But, as Bartholomew says, when you work on an encyclopedia, you're never really "finished." "We have a commitment to the people who buy Encarta to improve it every year. Instead of offering yearbooks every year that are generally created by totally different editorial staffs, our goal is to offer our customers a brand new encyclopedia they can upgrade to every year. That way, when major world changes occur, your maps will always be up to date; and major new information is linked and cross-referenced from all the timeless information that makes up encyclopedias."

So, as the next edition moves along, the lights burn late again in the offices of the Encarta team at Microsoft.

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