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.

I've been thinking up more ideas in my sketch book as I believe there to be several limitations with the idea of horror which I do not want to have to address in such a short project. The idea is still there I've just being doing some thinking to try and push through my issues or generate potential new ideas.

One of my issues with the horror is having to source or write a storie which will be able to support the interaction. If i'm doing something which would have a basic plot I can avoid some of these problems by layering a universe over a it.

I've been talking about subverting archetypal stories with various methods, and I wanted to put a list up here of some of the archetypes. this list I found on isegoria shows the basic areas I was thinking about

1. Cinderella – Unrecognised virtue at last recognised. It’s the same story as the Tortoise and the Hare. Cinderella doesn’t have to be a girl, nor does it even have to be a love story. What is essential is that the good is despised, but is recognised in the end, something that we all want to believe.


2. Achilles – The Fatal Flaw, that is the groundwork for practically all classical tragedy, although it can be made comedy too, as in the old standard Aldwych farce. Lennox Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy is the Fatal Flaw In reverse.


3. Faust- The Debt that Must be Paid, the fate that catches up with all of us sooner or later. This is found in all its purity as the chase in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. And in a completely different mood, what else is the Cherry Orchard?


4. Tristan – that standard triangular plot of two women and one man, or two men and one woman. The Constant Nymph, or almost any French farce.


5. Circe – The Spider and the Fly. Othello. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, if you want to change the sex. And if you don’t believe me about Othello (the real plot of which is not the triangle and only incidentally jealousy) try casting it with a good Desdemona but a poor Iago.


6. Romeo and Juliet – Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy either finds or does not find Girl: it doesn’t matter which.


7. Orpheus – The Gift taken Away. This may take two forms: either the tragedy of the loss itself, as in Juno and the Paycock, or it may be about the search that follows the loss, as in Jason and the Golden Fleece.


8. The Hero Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The best example of this is that splendid play Harvey, made into a film with James Stewart.

I have not linked any images or pictures so far for this project so I thought I would start with just a quick post of a potential style idea that I have been really inspired by.
The Thomas Beale Cipher
This has an incredible style with all its textures and interesting uses of positive and negative space. It is also semi interactive having 16 hidden messages in the piece.

If you look at the brief which I posted in this post you can see that having analysis and academic theory within our blogs is an important part of the project. I am going to start adding in more of this style of post alongside ones discussing visual research and project development.

In order to be able to start doing this I have picked up several books on a variety of topics which I think will help me in this project. Here are the books I've gotten out.

• Dalwood, Dexter et al. (2009) Storytime
• Hartas, Leo (2005) The art of game characters
• Jenisch, Josh (2008) The art of the video game
• Krugs, Steve (2006) Don't make me think: a common sense approach to web usability. 2nd edition.
• McQuillan, Martin (2000) The narrative readerO'Neill, Shaleph (2008) Interactive media: the semiotics of embodied interaction

This is just a starting point covering the points which I think will come up in this project; narative, video game design, and interaction. My hope is to find conmen trends in these book and identify potential areas of interest for design.

The Steve Krugs book is in the reading list for this brief along with several web links which I will make sure to look at.

As I mentioned in the last post I've had this brief for 1 week now so I've started coming up with ideas for what I could potential create.

The main idea I currently have is to create a horror piece. I think this genre is really suited to interactivity and the immersion provided by the ipad. while jotting down idea I realised that something similar to what I had in mind had already been created, Hotel 626.

I am yet to play Hotel 626 as currently I have no internet access and the game is restricted by the time of day. but I intend to play through it and see how it creates its story and what features could be used on the ipad. this description from cyberentries sums up the project; 

In honor of Doritos bringing back two intense flavors from the dead, we created an intensely scary website. You're trapped in a hotel and have to complete challenges--like singing a demon baby to sleep--to get out. Hotel 626 uses several groundbreaking techniques to dial up the experience. Your webcam sneaks a picture of you and shows it to you later--inside the lair of a madman. Your one salvation is a phone call on your actual cell phone with directions on how to get out. To make it scarier, you have to play in the dark. Hotel 626 is only open from 6pm to 6am.

Using the camera without the user knowing and restricting time are two very powerful story telling tools which help to build an atmosphere around the game. I was thinking about how it would be possible to play with time before I came across this as I believe that by taking real world variables and integrating them into the story you will get greater immersion and the boundary between the real and virtual will become blurred.

One issue which I have noticed from writing up my notes is that I have overlook a section of the brief where it states Take an existing short story. It was explained to us that this is in the brief so we do not get too distracted with character and story design and focus on user experience and user interface design. However I think that a large part of the UX will be from the story, if you want to create a story for an older target audience you will need to carefully integrate the interactive elements with the narrative.

I wrote down a really boiled down version of what I think this project is all about in my sketch book, I'm going to put it here as well so that I can refer back to it.
It's all about brining together multiple elements

Our second project was set to us last week though I have been in the process of moving house and have not been able to do much research into the project.

Brief

Design an interactive story for the ipad. Take an existing short story and adapt it to be interactive. This can be aimed at any target audience and can be fictional or non-fictional. You must consider your target audience and evidence this in your research blogs. Prepare and visualize your story so that a developer can interpret your designs and do the necessary coding. This will include wire framing (flow diagram) and storyboarding your app, with details of events that need to take place on each page. Your storyboard could be hand drawn/painted, or you could choose to use a digital method to produce your storyboard. You will also need to produce a dynamic visualization of your story in order to pitch and demonstrate how it will work. You need to consider why your chosen story will benefit from being interactive; this should be researched and referenced. You will need to consider the usability and user experience involved in designing for ipad, producing samples of user testing handouts/questionnaires, and, you will also need to evidence research into the technical options and constraints that development of such an app might encounter.  

I have highlighted the key points in bold and reviewing these it makes me think that I need more of an academic approach to my design process by providing evidence for my design decisions.

We only have 4 weeks to work on this project. We do not have to code anything which cuts out alot of time but we still have a very fast turn around for this project & many of the things we need to do will require preliminary work.

Here is the final piece I submitted for Aquapax.

You can also view this video on youtube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3t_Rf8kfE