Category Archives: Design
“The Other Chris”
Huzzah! This morning I published my first post to the Adaptive Path weblog, and people have been stoked on it all day. I’ve been working on designing the iPhone application to go along with the smart.fm learning website, and a large part of my contribution to the project so far has been sketching. Sketching, sketching, sketching.
I talk about it all in the post, but I can summarize it here as well. Smart.fm has a series of awesome learning games, based on heavy research into human psychology, that are designed to help you learn and retain facts. They have totally hit a sweet spot with people trying to learn other languages, and with the iPhone app we wanted to help people continue their learning, any place, any time. Their existing web-based games feature a sort of “flash cards on steroids” rhythm, which turns out to be a great functional description, but a poor metaphor for their actual gamelike feel. Thus, our goal with the iPhone app is to design something that perhaps resembles index cards at its most basic level, but from an experiential standpoint is a hell of a lot more fun.
And so, we began exploring metaphors. What makes something fun? What makes something gamelike? Alexa and Dan turned me loose with my sketchbook, and I began brainstorming enormous lists around such concepts as the materiality of the gamespace, the movements people perform to interact with the artifacts in the game, and how to best represent time and progress. I generated dozens and dozens of ideas, drawing inspiration from dollar store games to radio dials to Wooly Willy. Throughout my thought process I roughed these guys out on paper, giving ourselves a constant stream of tangible artifacts to look at, reflect on, believe in, or challenge. I talk about this process a bit more in this video, where I walk through my sketchbook with Chris and John, my fellow summer associates.
From these explorations I brought a few ideas up into a bit more coherence, which I talk about here:
We shared all this work with the client, who is absolutely stoked with it. In their blog post regarding this project they speak of a “super-talented summer associate” who produced some pretty cool visual explorations, but when they say that I wonder if they have me confused with Dave Pederson (a.k.a. “The Other Chris”, a.k.a. “The Mysterious Fourth Intern”).
Again, the thread at the Adaptive Path blog can fill you in on all the details. Needless to day, it is an absolute delight working with the fine folks at Cerego, and it is all thanks to them that we can be so open about our process in designing their iPhone app.
Proof that the new iPhone has a secret front-facing camera!
That Apple can activate remotely!
…why else would they tell you to wave your phone around like an idiot?
Fragment
Phew.
Long day. One last jam-packed ride on the 49 Muni to Japantown for Andrew Crow’s closing Interaction Design workshop for UX Intensive. An intense day of prototyping followed by a closing party, complete with an open bar and wonderful new friends with Minnesota and Bay Area connections alike. Then, a dash across town to the Adaptive Path office, for further drinks and entertaining in our inspiring design space.
Back to work tomorrow, with sketching on the menu. Sketching, sketching, sketching.
It is a good life.
Task Flows and Character Counts
Another busy night catching up on work. You might do better trying to catch me over at Twitter.
Hugs,
Dane
The Ganache Guru
Today we kicked off UX Intensive with a rousing session of Design Strategy, hosted by none other than Brandon Schauer. It was a great time and we got to wield Sharpies and Post-It Notes and drafting dots with reckless abandon, all the while being fed like kings.
It’s gonna be like this all week, with heavy-duty learning during the day and working during the night, so my contributions to the Ether will be light.
A summons to all your foolish blood.
826 Valencia is an amazing, wondrous place. I want to live in their world. I want to write again. I want to make people experience these things.
An Owl’s Life
Dan just posted the first public transmission regarding our project, with a slick little banner of my design, and now I’m at a bit more liberty to talk about the work I’m doing at Adaptive Path.
Smart.fm is a website dedicated to helping people accomplish goals and learn stuff they want to know, in a supportive and socially collaborative atmosphere. AP just wrapped up a project helping the folks at Cerego clearly define their user experience goals with the site, and now we’re in the process of designing, developing and launching an iPhone application to complement their web-based learning tools. The really cool thing is that these guys are super open about the work they do, and are more than happy to have us share our process as we craft their application.
Alexa and Dan just got back from Tokyo, where they were busy meeting with the brilliant brains behind Smart.fm and scoping out million-dollar cantaloupes in their free time. As we continue our design process we should find ourselves posting regular updates to the Adaptive Path blog, but I’ll try to chime in at this venue however I can.
For now, it’s time to grab some sharpies and start sketching, sketching, sketching!
I can’t wait to tell them about the exploding moon.
I woke up at 6:30 this morning and realized I had to give a 30-minute presentation to the company at noon, introducing myself to the entire gang. I was gunning for a largely visual deck and had flagged a number of photos in Aperture for this purpose, but I hadn’t even started assembling the presentation in Keynote.
It was definitely a cram and I think I pulled it off, but I did learn a thing or two about narration. If you introduce a character, say a car named the “Green Dragon Wagon”, your audience will become confused and uncomfortable when you replace it, unannounced, with a silver Subaru. Then, your audience will become downright hostile if you present a photo of an old pickup truck, unintentionally suggesting that this is your car, with nary a mention as to what happened to the Dragon or the Subaru.
You see, people interpret and grow attached to things, be they rhetorical conveyances or characters in a narrative. If you unintentionally toy with their emotions by flippantly dismissing or substituting these characters, they’ll call you on it. If they like you. If they don’t like you they’ll silently judge you for it, for the rest of their lives.
Also, in wrapping up my presentation I described to the company our concept work for Dane and James’ Lost Dreams, which is, for those who have forgotten, what you get when you combine a cruise ship with a roller coaster (you get Awesome, with a capital AWE). Yes, Dane and James’ Lost Dreams is a true work of user-centered brilliance, a cruise ship designed for the type of person that is most often attracted to cruise ships in the first place: chiefly, people who wear faded black Harley Davidson shirts with the sleeves cut off. Upon reflection, I wish Andrew could have been there for the “sharing out” of this, given his career history. Even so, we got some largely positive feedback on our work:
“Are you insane?!”
Probably. They’ve got eight more weeks of this, and they don’t even know the half of it yet.
