Evaluation

Overall, I feel that this project went well, time management aside. I have learned a lot about iPad design and creation,which is hopefully reflected in my work.
Although it took me a while to come up with my final idea, I feel that I did a good job in changing the original story to make it more unique, and I feel that I achieved my main goal with the story which was to make the reader feel more sympathetic towards the villain of the story.
The biggest problem I had was with time management, as I did not expect my story board to take as long as it did. This left we with a lot of work to do, as I needed to draw separate art for each page, which there were 27 of. I spent most of my time on the drawings rather than the storyboard itself.
I found making my visualisation easier than the storyboard as I had all my assets ready and I have had previous experience with After Effects so it wasn't as time consuming.
If I were to redo this project, I would spend more time planning out my storyboard and manage my time better so it wasn't left until the last minute. I would also spend more time brainstorming at the start of the project so I wasn't as stuck on ideas.

My Finished Dynamic Visualisation

bookappfinish from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

This is my finished piece. It explores the app, showing the nativation and various interactive elements of the story, and shows how it comes to life using the iPad.

Crit

After finishing my visualisation, I showed my work to my classmates and my tutors. Overall, the feedback I got was positive, and I received a lot of praise for my drawings. I also demonstrated how the iPad features worked well. However, there were some things that could be improved on, such as some parts of the interface. The arrows for turning the page left and right should go at the edge of the page rather than in the middle, and the menus should hide after a few seconds instead of taking up space throughout the whole story. Another thing i should change is the font for the settings and page select menus, as they don't fit in with the rest of the app and they are too large.

Usability Testing Questionnaire

After finishing my dynamic visualisation, I created a survey with various questions about my app, such as if the menus and navigation work well.

Storyboard

Here are pages from my completed storyboard. It shows every page of my story, as well as the menus that are used throughout the app.

Drawing the Illustrations for my App

For my app, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw all of my assets. After colouring and shading all of my art, I then merged the layers so that each character and background was on a separate layer, so I can animate each of them in After Effects. For my art style, I went for something similar to that of Tim Burton, as I feel that his work is quite child-friendly but also dark, which works well for the target audience I was going for.

Trip to Cogapp and Clearleft

Yesterday, we went on a trip to two companies in Brighton, which were Cogapp and Clearleft.

At Cogapp, we learnt about Information Achitecture, and how to organise information so the user can navigate through it easily. We learnt this through various methods, one of these being the "LATCH" method. LATCH stands for Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category, Hierarchy, which is how the information would be sorted. We did some exercises in sorting information, such as using the LATCH method to sort records in a music store. For example, sorting music by place in the Top 40 would go under Hierarchy.
Another information sorting exercise we did was how to sort food in a supermarket, which is quite different from sorting information on a website since items can't go under two categories like it can if it was data. Overall, I feel that the trip to Cogapp was informative and I learned some good information on how to sort data in a way that it is easy for users to understand.

The second place we went to was Clearleft, which specialises in usability testing. They showed us Silverback, which is user testing software which records the screen and the face of the tester whilst they are doing the usability testing. After learning about the software, we were put into groups to do our own usability test. One person would test a site, one would tell the tester what tasks to perform on the site, and the last person would take notes and observe the test. This was a fun and useful exercise, as we all took turns in the different roles, and learned about user testing in the process.