Week 12

Week 12 was a big week for the group, given that it was the week before our final demonstration was going to happen.  Everyone stepped up to the plate at this stage, producing a huge amount of content and constantly iterating on their designs.

Hamish started off the week strong with some designs for the feedback screen of the app.  I wasn't a huge fan of the way he quantified the scores out of five but otherwise I thought that the design was very effective in showing the user where they were in comparison to everyone else.  I also think that with the addition of some colour to indicate what's good and what's bad we'll be very close to perfect on this screen.

Proposed results page

Max also came out with some additional designs of the question area, the strengths of these were the well defined areas, breaks in screens, framing of the visual stimulus however they had a few weaknesses such as the lack of colour scheme and the underplaying of the visual elements.

Question UI prototype

From this I decided that I should do some in depth research into touch interfaces in relation to choose your own adventure games.  What I found was very inspiring.  The best example of a choose your own adventure had a very simple design, just using a textured background behind the choices and having large buttons, making them easy to touch.  I find this design very effective and suggested to the group the idea of using textures in the background of the question page.  This idea was received well, especially by Kyle who pushed for simplicity.

Screenshot of the decision page from "Underground Kingdom" by Visual Baker

After this revelation Max was assigned the task of designing the textures with the idea that each would be customised to the area that the story was in, for example a jungle themed texture for the jungle areas.  In hindsight I didn't go into enough detail with Max about what my vision was for this particular design aspect and he was a bit clueless of exactly what he was supposed to do, just attempting to make something without enough direction.  I later rectified this issue however my mistake meant that he wasted some time sort of guessing at what we wanted rather than just doing exactly it was that was needed.  At least this time allowed him to learn the techniques for creating textures which he would rely on later on.

We realised on Wednesday that we should have already submitted the prototype to the exhibition  Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding on our part (and particularly mine since I was supposed to be the one looking for this kind of stuff) we thought that the original submission to the exhibition was our own work only and we would submit our group work after the final demonstration.  Because of this we had to talk to onacloV about getting out work in the exhibition and she graciously agreed to let us have a change of still being included if we submitted our work to her before the demonstration  with adequate pictures and explanation to allow her to sell the idea to the other members of the selection committee   This inspired us to work even harder because we all really wanted the installation to be included in the exhibition.

While this was going on Hamish had finalised his prototype for the installation and was focusing on getting it actually built.  He did a great job of sources the materials by himself and building it at his own house.  While he was doing this Kyle managed to arrange with Anirban to get a ultrasonic sensor which would allow us to measure height far easier than any other alternatives we'd seen.  Getting the ultrasonic sensor off Anriban was a huge boon to our work as we were having difficulty sourcing one from elsewhere.

In the meantime Max was working on the textures, primarily communicating with me in order to get feedback on his designs.  With feedback Max's designs improved rapidly and he tried a wide range of techniques in order to get the effect that we wanted.  There was some debate in the group about what was required, Kyle thinking that a texture over the whole background was the way to go and with me thinking that a default dark grey texture with an intrusion by an element of the area the user is in being the way to go for greater visual continuity.

A later prototype showing the themed texture for the whole background, in this case some moss from the jungle

A later prototype illustrating the default texture with an element from the area, in this case some moss from the jungle

I also went about figuring out exactly what needed to be done and who would go about doing each task. This breakdown was very useful as it allowed us to figure out exactly what we needed to do and who would go about doing it, allowing us to help each other out in the case that one member was overloaded with work.  As it happened it worked out fairly evenly naturally which was great.

The to do list on the 25th of October

I also worked on the feedback for the application, writing it so that it was customised to both how well the user had gone with the application questions and their own BMI.  We decided to split the users into four groups based on their BMI.  These groups were: underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obese.  We also split the results into three different ranges, depending on how well the user did in each category.  The user could get a good, medium or bad score.  This meant that for each possible combination of score, category and BMI I wrote a customised response, resulting in a total of 36 possible pieces of feedback, with three being shown at one time, one for each of the categories (Fitness, nutrition and stress).  As far as the advice went I decided that giving a few pieces of practical advice such as telling the user to go for a run or eat more fruit would be far more useful than the generic doctor's warnings.  I didn't want to set out an exact health plan for the user, just give them a few tips to get them on the right path and trust that they'd be able to do the rest themselves.

The week ended with Max and I expressing our concerns about the look of the app.  We were worried that the clinical and downplayed textured backgrounds could be incongruous with the overall look of the outside physical set up (which we planned on having art on) and the questions which were fairly out there.  We discussed this with the other group members and came to the conclusion that we should see if we could make the interface more fun but if not the designs we had would still be quite effective as they were very visually appealing.

With only a few day to go till the demonstration we've got lots of work to do but it's all coming together now and it looks like we'll have a great product to show off on Wednesday.  I know the group is very excited about getting our work to the highest standard possible and showing it off to everyone in the class!