Our client, The HistoryMakers, is a non-profit organization that is aimed at promoting unheard stories of prominent members of the African American community. Their website allows users to navigate a large database of biographies and video interviews. This project delivered an interactive browser experience to help bring their content to a younger audience of twenty-somethings, focusing on playful interaction and
Apr. 26 – Apr. 30 Progress This week was our softs presentation (Monday), where we presented an operational version (1.0) to the faculty, answered questions, and took their feedback. The major addition over the weekend before was this loading page, intended to smooth the entry into our experience, since it takes some time to load our assets. It’s also an
Apr. 19 – Apr. 23 Progress This week, our front-end programmer spent some time addressing compatibility issues with Safari on mobile iOS devices, so the experience works on all platforms now, although continuous adjustments and testing needs to be done separately for these devices when new features are implemented. We made some changes to the layout to better balance emphasis
Apr. 12 – Apr. 16 Progress We entered week 11 with our prototype ready for the desktop. Now our focus shifted to implementing the overview section for the mobile version. Due to the small size of a mobile screen, it was a challenge to display all the HistoryMakers in the overview subsets and so we decided the user could only
Apr. 5 – Apr. 9 Progress By the middle of the week, we had all the styling and functionality implemented for all parts. There were some design changes, including keeping the dark background across both tabs, changing the style of the button, adding a popup for the Digital Archive button to inform users that they would be leaving our experience,
Mar. 29 – Apr. 2 Progress We settled on the overall structure of our experience (and working terminology) that can address a variety of user needs:1. Detail View – Browse through a ring of pictures of HistoryMakers that match the chosen filters. This is for people who have just entered the experience or are only interested in browsing individuals in
Mar. 22 – Mar. 26 We decided to pivot away from showing videos of HistoryMakers, focusing instead on presenting the people and their information in a clean and playful way. For part 1, we got rid of the projector device and made the filters flat stripes (keeping the dragging component). Knowing the ring shape and animation was appealing, we incorporated
Mar. 15 – Mar.19 Last week we made some changes to our production process, and had the designers push out decisions much earlier. For our version 2, we changed he concept from music record vinyl to DVDs. The record player was changed to a futuristic projector. We also used official fonts and colors of The HistoryMakers. Part 1 was modified
Mar. 8 – Mar. 12 Last week we had decided to build our first real prototype for playtesting. Our overall guiding theme was music and vintage but modern aesthetics. The concept was to visualize the people in the archive as music albums, each containing 2-3 minute video snippets of a their interviews. There are two parts: a record player view
Mar. 1 – Mar. 5 Reflecting on the feedback from 1/4s walkarounds and sitdowns, this week we came up with three ideas – timeline with adjustable filters rings, create your own album cover and a 3D space to freely navigate to feel the expanse of The HistoryMakers. By the mid week we created mock ups for the ideas. Upon our