The Week in Review

For our client and our team, this week started with good news and ended with a bit of bad news.

We began with a Sunday playtest at the Carnegie Science Center. In the same corner of the museum where we did our first paper playtest eight weeks ago, we brought a mock up of our kiosk for the first ever full playtest with kids. The test could not have been more successful: kids enjoyed themselves and spent more than ten minutes in the experience; they found the experience easy to use and understood what they were doing; they worked with their siblings, friends, or parents to tell stories; they formed a line for the playtest and waited patiently for their turn. All of this gave our client, who visited just for the playtest, confidence in our work and alleviated one of their potentially problematic concerns, that kids would not know which of the two screens to look at.

We returned to our office with a long list of relatively minor changes we needed to make
and content we needed to add. We needed to slow down text speeds, improve animations, add audio, and shift all of our art assets to a new resolution in preparation for a switch from our test hardware to the actual hardware we would be using. While each task was relatively minor, together they added up to more hours than we had. As we looked at two weeks that
remained before halves, it seemed we would have to trim features.

The first feature we looked at was an email the story home feature, which the client haddiscussed early on and which the faculty had advised against during Halves. We knew it wasimportant to the client, but we also knew the feature would be difficult, and potentially build breaking, to implement. We spent a few days talking—to each other, to the clients, and to the faculty—to see if there was any way of reaching the clients’ goal of giving kids some digital takeaway. Ultimately, we determined that given the length of time left in the semester—we could not insure we would be able to deliver a working e-mail feature that wouldn’t jeopardize the overall, robust experience we had created.

On Friday, we delivered the news to our client. We acknowledged that we had been overly ambitious in suggesting that this was a feature we might be able to achieve. While we had achieved a great deal in less than six weeks of production and met many of our and their project goals, this was something we just couldn’t do. The best we could offer was to leave a part of the system open for this feature. This way, if the client finds they really need this feature, they could add it when they do a second iteration of the exhibit.

We Suggest

• Moonbot’s iPad story Apps are just fantastic. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr.
• Morris Lessmore blurs the line between storybook, animation, and interaction.
• On the topic of story structure, a recent blog illustrates the narrative structure of popular radio programs on napkins (http://howsound.org/2013/03/ my-kingdom-for-some-structure/)
• Stickers. During our playtest, we gave kids stickers as a way of saying thanks. Kids love stickers.

The Week Ahead

The week ahead will be a mad rush towards our soft opening on the 22nd. We’ll be:

• Accepting delivery of the physical build of our kiosk.
• Applying vinyl to color our exhibit.
• Running a playtest with six boys on Wednesday
• Shooting and editing promo videos in preparation for Softs