KNOW YOUR DINOS PROTOTYPE
Know Your Dinos is an iPad application created for The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I created this application with my colleague Hannah Dominiak for the Digital Publishing Studio at Ball State University. The purpose of the application was to engage children and introduce them to the dinosaurs and artifacts at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
Although the application was produced as an educational tool, it also must promote the museum, engage children and showcase the many fossils at the Children's Museum. The application was created with high levels of interactivity because children are more interested in making pieces move than actually reading and consuming the information.
The app is set up almost like a computer game and walks children through four activities for each dinosaur. Features like spinning teeth, a camera feature and animation keeps the audience interested, but still informed.
STORIES FROM OUR COMMUNITY PROTOTYPE
Stories from Our Community is an iPad application created for The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I created this application with my colleague Hannah Dominiak for the Digital Publishing Studio at Ball State University. The purpose of the application was to organize and illustrate the various stories from the surrounding community that the Children's Museum had collected. The challenge was to create a database that was engaging and could be organized in various ways.
We chose to make this application look like a book because a book seemed like the best way to include photos, text and audio. They requested that we should have several ways of organizing the stories based on what the audience wanted to read. We sorted the stories by name, theme, location, and children's stories.
VOX PRODUCT BUILDS WORKSHOP
During the Society for News Design Digital Judging in Indianapolis, I was invited to participate in a workshop with Vox Media to design a website for students who would be traveling to Cuba for journalism. We were given a step-by-step process to design a website based on a mood that we wanted to convey. We began with a typography palette, the created a mood board based on the typography, and then we filled wireframes based on our mood board.
The most challenging aspect of this was create a website without content. The stakeholder, the professor leading this trip, was not sure what to expect from it. The website was created with room to expand as new content was created. The final website has not yet been created, but will be within the next two to three weeks. To read more about my experience at this workshop, click here.
SOCIETY FOR NEWS DESIGN CRASH COURSE
The Society for News Design brought professionals to Ball State to teach a handful of students about user interaction and user experience. We began the workshop by selecting a member of our audience, creating a persona based on that personality, and focusing on their particular needs.
We chose a tenured professor as our audience member. Because our professor was tenure track, we assumed that he would be interested in his progress. We also considered another aspect of our audience, the students.
What we ended up conceptualizing was an anonymous application that allows instantaneous professor/student feedback via mobile device and desktop computer. Each user would have a similar interface that would allow them to interact in a professional and constructive manner. The students would provide live, anonymous comments and feedback during the lecture. Students would be able to rate each comment up or down based on their opinions similar to the anonymous social media app, Yik Yak.
We decided that the application should mimic the social media interface that students were already used to. This would promote short comments and make it easy for students to immediately react on their mobile device. If a professor was talking too fast, a student could easily rate them lower, or they could comment straight to the professor that he or she is speaking too quickly.
Although the initial goal of the weekend was to create a news tool, we ended up creating something that, to me, seems far more usable and dynamic.
