After undergoing our last project sprint, we had the opportunity to showcase our app at the Entertainment Technology Center’s annual fall Festival, during which invitees from all over the globe come to see what students at the ETC have been working on over the course of the semester.

All in all, Festival went incredibly well for us! Guests consistently liked our prototype a great deal, and both of our clients were happy with what we were showing.

After Festival, and after giving our final presentation in front of a full house at the ETC, all we had left to do was prepare for handing our project off to our clients. To do so, we first finished off our technical documentation packet, which will help our clients through the process of releasing the app on both the Google Play store and the App Store, as well as guide future development teams through the process of adding more individuals to the Pittsburgh Walk of Fame app.

Additionally, we made sure that our build worked on iPhones as well as Android devices, since both our clients have iPhones. Funnily enough, this solved an accessibility issue we’d been plagued with for a huge chunk of the semester—with an iPhone, scanning a star plaque now works perfectly without needing to bend down towards the plaque!

Finally, in finalizing our technical documentation, we’ve decided to provide our clients with a short design document detailing feature concepts that we hope will help guide future teams in developing the Pittsburgh Walk of Fame app to its fullest potential. Just some of these features we’ve outlined include an honoree unlock system (which would allow guests to return to individuals whose plaques they’ve scanned without needing to scan again), a photo review mode (complete with the capability to share photos to social media), pinning Pittsburgh Connection locations in a separate maps app (such as Google Maps), and more.

Overall, we’ve had a great time working on City of Stars this semester, and we appreciate you coming along with us for the ride!

In particular, we found that we still had some usability issues to fix. Guests still couldn’t figure out that they needed to tap on highlighted neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh Connection to view how those neighborhoods related to each of our app’s honorees, and the icon we used for the button that returns guests to the star-scanning page wasn’t quite intuitive. What’s more, we found that we needed to rework some of our Discovery page content for Roberto Clemente, as the page’s written material wasn’t doing a good job of representing aspects of Clemente’s life that were core ethos (such as his humanitarian work). Finally, we realized that we still needed to make the plaque-scanning portion of our experience feel a bit more magical, as well as give guests more feedback letting them know when they’ve successfully scanned a plaque.

We were able to fix all of these issues.

We added an animation to interactable Pittsburgh Connection neighborhoods, and we changed up the “scan star” button icon to a star inside a pair of brackets (which guests found to be far more intuitive). What’s more, we’ve added titles for each honoree in our app (so guests can, at a glance, get an idea for what the person they’re discovering did), and we’ve changed the “take selfie” button icon to that of a camera with a figure behind it (to distinguish that button from the “scan plaque” button).

We’ve also changed up content for Roberto Clemente, both swapping out subject matter and reducing assumptions we’d previously made about guests’ prior knowledge of the baseball player.

Finally, we added more VFX and SFX to our transition animation that triggers once a star plaque is scanned.

And on top of all that, we were able to both add a completely new feature (in which guests can now create their own virtual star to place on the ground) and finish off our project’s trailer (which you can now see on our site’s home page).

Next week, as Festival draws closer, we’ll be shifting more gears into the realm of writing up documentation (which will both help our clients launch the app and aid future development teams in adding more honorees to the app’s structure). We’ll also be getting our room ready for more visitors to stop by, so stay tuned for that as well!

Our next target was to design the Roberto Clemente discovery page and other content. We came up with the idea of having the fun facts portrayed through cards, those typical baseball cards of old on which Clemente’s face was often found. These cards could be released by ripping open a pack of cards from the discovery page. A sample of the concept is shown below.

And again, since sections other than the discovery page are built in a modular design, the structure of Pittsburgh Connection and Media Gallery for Roberto Clemente are similar with the ones for Rachel Carson and Andy Warhol. We kept the total number of facts and connections similar, so that we don’t look like we are emphasizing one individual but not another.

We also got started on our plans for celebrity number 3, Roberto Clemente. To aid with research, we scheduled an appointment with the Roberto Clemente museum and went together as a team for the tour. We learnt a lot about the life of Clemente, something that one wouldn’t find so easily on a search engine. We noted down a lot of information that we learnt and next week we’ll be deciding how to put it together for the app. For those of you haven’t visited the museum, it is a must see!

In other news, we had our ETC first years visit us to shadow our project. It is an huge learning opportunity for them and also a good chance for us to showcase our project internally.

See you next week then!

We also had new ideas for our next celeb, Rachel Carson, which we wanted to get initial reactions to. For this, we prepared a paper prototype that envisions her life’s work, and conveys the effects of DDT on nature and the ecosystem. The intention was to have an interactive while informative interaction and paper prototypes are the best and cheapest way to get the point across.

So come Saturday, we had a deluge of visitors in our project room. Sometimes when we had too many, we split them between the paper prototype and the mobile experience. Our audience were mostly teenagers but we also had a great mix of adults and kids thrown in too. They pointed out a lot of places where they got stuck, and we quickly got in edits between sessions. Overall, the response was really positive. We had a fantastic range of responses and people commended us and acknowledged that they knew more about Andy Warhol now than they did when they entered the room. We compiled detailed playtest reports for each of the 12 sessions which we’ll go through early next week. Here are a few snapshots from our playtest events:

City of Stars were the third team on Wednesday to present. We had demonstrated a little demo previously to our faculty, so armed with their tips and suggestions for an improved performance, we got set for our presentation. We had a video demo (which included Fangda acting as a user simulated in an external environment) which walked through all the interactions and pages we had prepared for Andy Warhol. We also mentioned in the presentation that our next celebrities would be Rachel Carson and Roberto Clemente who would soon feature in the app. I won’t go into much detail of what was entailed in our presentation as we’ve already covered all that in blogs from previous weeks.

We received good feedback from all those who watched us, and other than minor suggestions about the slides and the interface, our design was well approved and verified by those who were judging us on the quality of our product.  We were happy with this as we knew that our processes getting so far were in the right direction , and we could go full steam ahead to achieve our targets for the semester.

And that’s exactly what we did, as after a short mid-semester break, we put our noses down and got to work, as there was plenty to be done in time for our next major playtest at the end of next week. More on that then…

We also had the playtest to refine workshop this week. This was a good preparation for future playtests, like the one we will have during Playtest day on November 3. We prepared for this by making a player experience map on a chart paper (shown below). They had several different recipes like- “Theme”, “Events”, “Character”, etc and they were repeatedly referred to during the workshop too. It was an immensely useful experience and a huge shoutout to ETC Faculty Mike Christel for organizing it.

As shown in the experience map, we have started to concept the visuals for Rachel Carson as well. Since we are aiming at making this prototype modular enough so that future development team can expand it rather easily, Rachel’s page will be using a similar structure as Andy Warhol.

In other news, we were visited by former ETC Faculty Tina ‘Bean’ Blaine this week who gave us her feedback on our app experience so far. Her specialty being sound design, she suggested a few ideas as to how we could approach create sounds and music for our app as that is something we haven’t really spent too much time on.

That’s all for today.Tune in next week to know how our halves went!

It’s been a busy week again for Project City of Stars. We were working on developing the application with one eye on the halves presentation and the midterms due next week. It was crucial that we nail down the design soon as we had to scope out for more celebrities in our list, other than Andy Warhol.

Based on previous iterations and our lo-fi prototypes which were playtested, we had our detailed high fidelity prototypes nailed down for Andy Warhol.  The goal of this interface was to be a fun , engaging and intuitive product and our research and results highlighted the same.

Below is a high level overview of the hi-fi prototype. Feel free to take a minute and zoom in and scan through each of the pages.

Here’s a gif explaining how the dial works:

There are three pages you can scroll and access through the dial. They are:

1. Time Capsule:  Andy Warhol used to collect time capsules where he stored the  most mundane of items. This page highlights several of such items, and it has a secret “interaction” once you clear out the items and find the silver cloud.
2. Pittsburgh Connection: A Timeline Map of Pittsburgh which highlights and describes prominent locations of interest for Andy Warhol fans.
3. Media Gallery: A collection of works of and related to Andy Warhol, which include pictures, videos and external links.

These pages will be modified for other celebrities to accurate represent and present relevant information.

In other news, we had visitors this week as Anthony Daniels (notable British Thespian famous for playing C3PO on the Star Wars franchise) and industry professionals from Activision visited us in our project room and we got a chance to demonstrate our progress so far. They gave us good feedback and encouraged us to chase the fun!

Until next week then…

We demonstrated this to our clients on Wednesday and they liked how cool it was. They also gave suggestions on the content and the level of inter-activeness. We took all the feedback in our stride and planned different options to sample and playtest. We also thought about getting started with the content for the second celebrity, after Andy Warhol. We shortlisted Rachel Carson and Roberto Clemente for that honor. Another bit of feedback that we received was about the animation transition (after image recognition, a transition takes the user to the celebrity’s home page). We’re currently working on a great and inviting transition which we can incorporate quite easily.

To decide on the content for Andy Warhol, we sent out a survey with a list of facts about Andy Warhol, and let people share which ones are more interesting than others. This is a way for us to get a quick and solid reaction to the content that will be chosen for each individual. And of course, the final content decision will be made both on the survey results and our own interpretation.

On top of that, we also needed to playtest again to get public reaction on the User Interface and the “Pittsburgh Connections” map idea, so we laid out snacks and invited ETC students into our room on Friday. We received a variety of suggestions in terms of layout, style and UI from our many playtesters. We’re happy about the general feedback and we’re compiling the detailed results as we speak.

We prepared enough material to talk about our project for about 5 minutes, where we summarized our project, went through our playtests and show a little tech demo (we had the plaque set up in our room). It was a very busy period, but we were pleased with the outcome. We got a lot of initial thoughts from the faculty and they gave us plenty of things to think about, for now, and the future until the end of the project. Some of the notable things include emphasizing the fun parts of the project and making the experience such that people feel more connected to the city and the celebrities’ link with Pittsburgh.

We made a list of all the feedback we received and categorized them into “important”, “irrelevant” and  “keep in mind”. We then had more design sprints to re-work our potential user journey and experience. Find out more next week…

BONUS: Team photo!