Month: December 2017

This week, we wrapped up the Storiverse project. That meant:

• Getting our archive together so that future ETC projects can refer back to the work we did
• Sending all of our code files and a “Lessons Learned” document to our client, Verizon’s Open Innovation Team
• Giving a 15-minute presentation to ETC faculty and students on what we accomplished this semester
• Guiding a couple of faculty members through a final playthrough of our experience

All in all, the team feels proud of how the Storiverse project played out. The presentation went very well. Additionally, we were visited by Christian, a member of the Verizon team, and he gave us some extremely positive feedback. He is very pleased with our work and thinks it will be useful to Verizon going forward.

This week was exciting for us, because we got to showcase our product for non-ETCers at the ETC Festival.

We set up for the festival by arranging our room to look like a home living room. We moved couches to face the TV, and hung decorative lights.

During the festival, we had the TV playing the three Relationship Status episodes included in our product (episodes 1, 4, and 5) on a loop. When guests came in, we told them that our experience was designed to compliment the show. Guests could choose whether to see our experience immediately, or to watch a bit of the show first, for context.

We were thrilled to see that most of our guests enjoyed our product. Even guests who chose not to watch any Relationship Status before opening our app were interested in the questions we posed, and many ended up watching the matching clips so they could see where the questions came from in the context of the show. Guests were able to easily navigate through the UI, and enjoyed the personality descriptions they were given.

Week 14 started off with a bang, as Monday morning was Soft Opening, or “softs.” During softs, ETC faculty members came to our project room to see our product, and give us feedback on what we might think about changing in the two weeks before the semester ends. Faculty members visited our room in groups of 3-4, and stayed for 20 minutes. Since we wanted to get as much feedback as possible, we could not have the faculty watch a full episode of Relationship Status, which would be about ten minutes long. On the other hand, we still wanted the faculty to have some introduction to the show before we gave them our product. Thus, we abridged Episode 4 to be around 5 minutes long, and had the faculty watched that shortened version. Then, we gave them our product with no context, and waited to see if they could figure out how to use it.

Faculty reaction to our product was mixed. Some faculty members felt that we had done a good job meeting the requirements we were given by the client. Others were dissatisfied with our usage of AR. However, the faculty were nearly unanimous in their desire for us to iterate upon the UI. We spent the rest of the week tweaking the UI to make the experience flow clearer for users.