Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

A really helpful tool in to help me design this app is the iOS Human Interface Guidelines. This documents "describes the guidelines and principles that help you design a superlative user interface and user experience for your iOS app.". 

This project is all about combining multiple elements to create a single piece so before I have my story sorted I have decided to have a quick run through of the guidelines and see if there are any key areas that I need be aware of during this stage of the development. There are areas covered in the document such as screen resolution which I will need to come back to once I start designing the interactions.

Create an application definition statement 

An application definition statement is a concise, concrete declaration of an app’s main purpose and its intended audience.
Create an application definition statement early in your development effort to help you turn an idea and a list of features into a coherent product that people want to own. Throughout development, use the definition statement to decide if potential features and behaviors make sense. Take the following steps to create a solid application definition statement.

I have head this strategies talked about in reference to several different areas and it is a really useful to practice this. Once I have decided on exactly what my story will contain will I will write one of these. This will help me to prevent issues such as function creep as I can refer back to the statement like it suggests and described how relevant potential art styles, interaction, etc. are to the overall goal of the app.

The following section is not very relevant to the stage I'm currently at but I think it will be really important to remember this as I develop the design of my app.

Be internally consistent. The more custom your UI is, the more important it is for the appearance and behavior of your custom elements to be consistent within your app. If users take the time to learn how to use the unfamiliar controls you create, they expect to be able to rely on that knowledge throughout your app.

The following guideline is quite interesting to consider when thinking about wheather to have a linear or non linear experience

Give People a Logical Path to Follow
Make the path through the information you present logical and easy for users to predict. In addition, be sure to provide markers, such as back buttons, that users can use to find out where they are and how to retrace their steps.
In most cases, give users only one path to a screen. If a screen needs to be accessible in different circumstances, consider using a modal view that can appear in different contexts.

This could be one way of empowering an interactive story with the same feeling of a narrative story. Andrew Cameron talks about this difference between interactivity and narrative as being concerned with perspective

The shift from narrative representation to interactive representation entails an aspectual shift like that from perfective to imperfective, from outside to inside the time of the situation being described.  

If I develop my idea considering this it will help me keep my story as that and not a game, alongside having a straight path through the piece it will help maintain the familiarities of narrative.

I had not really though about the implications of the users Always Be [able] to Stop. Thinking quickly about this I believe that you can avoid the initial problem by making the story really immersive. However if I have animated sequences or key bits of interactivity I need to allow my users to be able to go back in case they where unable to pay attention to that time or closed the program during one of those sections.