new media senior project

The focus of this week’s discussion revolved around the importance of designing a comprehensive experience for users, both in terms of usability, as well as visual appeal.

The first example of this involved a hunk of cheese the author had purchased and had delivered to his home. He admitted that although he could indeed have purchased cheese of equal quality from a local store, the element which made the difference in his purchase was the presentation, or the “experience of getting to the product”. In order to open up the package, he had to first remove the cheese from the plastic, branded shipping package – very high class. Inside, the cheese was wrapped in some ridiculously lavish paper, and sealed with a couple of gaudy stickers branded with the “Harvey Nichols” logo.

While this unnecessarily fancy wrapping job raised the price of the cheese slightly beyond that which could be purchased locally, the author argued that the experience of unwrapping the otherwise mundane product gave it a sense of worth beyond the store-bought variant. Though this may have seemed somewhat preposterous at first, we ultimately decided that products endowed with a special, branded experience of some sort definitely feel more special than more generic product.

Our main discussion on this topic concerned the differences between name-brand cereal and the generic store brands. Many name-brand cereals go out of their way to build an experience over that of the store brands. Between mascots, colorful box art, and hidden toys, nobody contested that the “experience” around brand-name cereal is far superior to those surrounding the more generic brands.

Another interesting example we discussed is how the flashy 3D presentation for James Cameron’s Avatar was likely the largest contributing factor to the film’s humungous success in theaters. Although the story, dialogue, and characters break no new cinematic ground, the visuals, for once enhanced by 3D, immerse the audience much more effectively than any movie ever has to this point. Without a doubt, the strongest aspect of Avatar is the visual experience.

 In short, no matter the quality of a product, the deciding factor of its effectiveness often comes down to one thing: PRESENTATION. The presentation and experience of an otherwise mundane product can ultimately elevate it beyond its competitors, serving as a hook for prospective users or customers.

 The next topic of discussion was the importance of effective and intuitive interfaces. The author recalled an instance where he was on an airplane, and his neighbor was having difficulties with a video interface on the back of the seat in front of him. When the man tried to interact with the touch screen, selecting a video to play, the device ended up taking longer than he thought was reasonable. Instead of waiting patiently, the man did what came naturally to people faced with frustratingly slow technology – he punched the button – again and again, harder and harder. While this would ordinarily be a minor problem, this particular interface was mounted directly on the back of the seat in front of him. This way, every time he hammered his finger into the screen, the person sitting in that seat had to suffer having their head pummeled forwards over and over.

 One such example of a poor interface we discussed was the confusing layout of burner controls on certain infamous kitchen stoves. While conventional stoves have four burners arranged in a square, many of these stoves do little to indicate to the user which dial controls burner. In addition to being a nuisance, this kind of poor interface can create hazardous conditions, leading to severe bodily harm.

 The point of all of this is that a confusing or ineffective interface causes problems for more people than those directly using it. By pounding on the screen, the man seated with the author caused the passenger in the next seat to become agitated, who in turn may have had less patience with others over the course of the day. No matter how impressive the capabilities of a system may be, the whole experience can be quickly ruined by a poor interface. After all – what use is an interface if nobody can figure out how to operate it?

 The last subject of discussion focused on the subject of “evidence of use”. The author argues that these marks of physical wear and tear are something that is sorely missing from the digital medium. In a world where everything is sterile and static, he feels that we lose part of “that which makes us human”. Where beloved books have telltale marks such as coffee stains, creases, worn edges, and broken spines which indicate fond use, there are no similar signs of wear on, say, our favorite MP3 files.

 While I don’t fully grasp the relevance of this, I understand where he’s coming from. There’s just something comforting and novel about looking through an aged family photo album where all the pictures have been discolored and faded over the years. This same sort of novelty is most certainly lacking from images scanned or transferred into the digital medium. Despite this, I fail to see what such a “wear and tear” feature would add. In my opinion, it’s this level of indefinite preservation which made the digital medium preferable to analog in the first place.

This weeks video:

Our video broked. from Team Growl on Vimeo.

As for the next installment of our discussion meetings, here is the run down about what you will see.

Matt reports to the group what he found to be the strongest points within the reading.

First he explained to us how Dawes actually hooked up his doorbell to go off every time someone visited his site.  Although we could see how that was cool,
at the same time we realized how annoying it had to be. The message though wasn’t about the end means but the process to get there.
Start from the very beginning with something simple, and then work your way up

Another Strong point was to not try to reinvent the wheel. Multiple times it was discussed how that is true and helpful. If you’re not spending all your time
trying to restart from scratch you have more time to focus on other things like details.

The next topic was a little bit controversial. The section was label Jazz and Computing. The message was if it works go with it, even if it’s hacked. It was argued that enjoy happy mistakes, but from a developers view accidents only mean trouble down the road. With code it’s really black and white with no gray, if something in your code is happening that really shouldn’t you’re probably going to run into an app issue down the road.

Finally Dawes stresses bringing in real life experience into what we do. For example with designing a game, people have a tendency to move around depending on what they do in a game. That gave way to the idea behind the Nitendo Wii.

This was a longer discussion then last time.

Untitled from Team Growl on Vimeo.

Sorry about the shooting in the beginning, we tried something new with the filming this time.

From from our lengthy billiards excursion we found ourselves talking about inspirational sources which lead us to Brendan Dawes’s book : “Analog In, Digital Out”

Instead of exclusively summarizing our discussion of getting inspired we felt it would be more pertinent to just film with with a webcam. Some of the ideas discussed the core ideas of Brendan Dawes first chapter:

Taking inspiration from everywhere around us: not just web design.

As a society we are loosing physical objects like photographs for digital files that are stored for later use.

To act with your ‘gut instinct’ when it comes to decision making and direction.

To add a second dimension and create a user revalation: to inspire the “A-HA” moment with ever person possible.

But we can’t really do it justice to just summarize what we discussed, the video really speaks for itself: