The Work This Week:
With a shortened week this week due to Thanksgiving break, Picture Yourself spent our time finalizing our prototype and doing some playtesting in the ETC lobby.
With our prototype, we tested the complete experience, including the “Where are you from?” question and the Share page. The UI directed towards the Share page didn’t seem intuitive, as guests frequently stopped the experience after viewing their picture on the wall. Guests either showed some hesitancy towards taking pictures, while some leaned directly into taking wacky ones, so giving guests freedom in this space in both of these directions will be important.
We also got the chance to speak with Mike Christel at the ETC, discussing the best methods in which to write our documentation. He suggested that we go light on doing a design doc showcasing all our decisions over the semester, and instead lean into the technical and troubleshooting aspects of the documentation. He also suggested that we have a lot of images to support the text.
With regards to our upcoming handoff, we got the chance to speak with Clear Story, a vendor based in Pittsburgh who designs and installs installations like ours. They expressed some concern over using edgeblending in our projectors, stating that having them on a table near in the ground is inviting guests and other people to bump into them and mess up the blending. That being said, they were enthusiastic in talking with us and seem interested in potentially being partners with our installation in the future. When we meet with our client next week, this will confirm their involvement in our future endeavors.
Finally, with regards to our prototype development, we finalized the second question (“What are you interested in?”) to test tomorrow for Softs.
In this design, guests can choose from a selection of interest hashtags and will then be directed to a mosaic of the associative CMU department that specializes in this interest. There will be a text description overlayed on the mosaic to explain the connection:
For example, if a guest chooses #InformationSystems as their interest, they will be directed to mosaic that reads “Heinz” along with the text “CMU’s Heinz College is an interdisciplinary program for the next generation of leaders, connecting People, Policy, and Technology.”
Going Forward:
Next week is soft opening and our next client meeting. We are looking forward to all of the feedback.