Week 14

This week was all about making our last push towards finishing off our Pittsburgh Walk of Fame app, as well as preparing for the ETC Festival, final presentations, and final playthroughs. During soft opening (a pre-Festival event during which all of the faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center playtest teams’ product), we got a lot of helpful feedback.

In particular, we found that we still had some usability issues to fix. Guests still couldn’t figure out that they needed to tap on highlighted neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh Connection to view how those neighborhoods related to each of our app’s honorees, and the icon we used for the button that returns guests to the star-scanning page wasn’t quite intuitive. What’s more, we found that we needed to rework some of our Discovery page content for Roberto Clemente, as the page’s written material wasn’t doing a good job of representing aspects of Clemente’s life that were core ethos (such as his humanitarian work). Finally, we realized that we still needed to make the plaque-scanning portion of our experience feel a bit more magical, as well as give guests more feedback letting them know when they’ve successfully scanned a plaque.

We were able to fix all of these issues.

We added an animation to interactable Pittsburgh Connection neighborhoods, and we changed up the “scan star” button icon to a star inside a pair of brackets (which guests found to be far more intuitive). What’s more, we’ve added titles for each honoree in our app (so guests can, at a glance, get an idea for what the person they’re discovering did), and we’ve changed the “take selfie” button icon to that of a camera with a figure behind it (to distinguish that button from the “scan plaque” button).

We’ve also changed up content for Roberto Clemente, both swapping out subject matter and reducing assumptions we’d previously made about guests’ prior knowledge of the baseball player.

Finally, we added more VFX and SFX to our transition animation that triggers once a star plaque is scanned.

And on top of all that, we were able to both add a completely new feature (in which guests can now create their own virtual star to place on the ground) and finish off our project’s trailer (which you can now see on our site’s home page).

Next week, as Festival draws closer, we’ll be shifting more gears into the realm of writing up documentation (which will both help our clients launch the app and aid future development teams in adding more honorees to the app’s structure). We’ll also be getting our room ready for more visitors to stop by, so stay tuned for that as well!