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Posts related to: User Experience

The Current State of Interactive Documentary

By Miriam Simun
March 2, 2012
User Experience
The Interactive Documentary Bear 71

The Interactive Documentary Bear 71

What is the future of storytelling? 

This question is being asked a lot these days.  The availability of new tools and new media strategies have brought about many experiments in storytelling.  Whether incorporating social media, gaming, augmented reality, audience participation, or transmedia narratives, various elements are being pieced together in different ways to create new experiences.  I recently attended a two talks at MOMA about the current state of Interactive Documentaries — specifically, documentaries native to the web.

Part I of “A Field Guide to the Interactive Documentary,”  was hosted by Zach Wise, the multimedia producer responsible for much of the innovative work at The New York Times. The two projects Wise showed really stood out: Johnny Cash Project, which creates an ever evolving music video from over 250,000 (and counting) user contributions, and the NYT’s “A Year at War” project, which enables visitors to navigate their own journey through a breadth of video content, articles, and original documentation to learn about the stories of the U.S. military at war in Afghanistan. 

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Top 10 Takeaways from the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai

By Michael Schneider
June 3, 2010
Culture + Museums, Design, Shanghai Expo, Technology and Media, User Experience
visitors in the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010

Visitors in "Green Shanghai" at the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, strolling, taking pictures and making the fiber optic reeds change color.

For the last few years I have had the opportunity to participate in the design of the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion for the 2010 World Expo. Along with our team of partners, I witnessed the transformation of the Pavilion's site from an empty lot, to a busy construction zone, to the stunning cube of light that it is today. It has been incredibly rewarding to see it completed, and to watch thousands of visitors carrying our design forward as a participatory experience.  

I have also had the opportunity to visit more than 20 other pavilions at the Expo. Some are amazing experiences and others are, well, not as engaging. From my perspectives as both a designer and a visiting tourist, the most successful pavilion experiences had many of the same characteristics of design excellence. Here are my top ten:

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The Writing Zone

By Dan Hedges
May 7, 2010
Design, User Experience

The media content you create for visitors to read, watch, or listen to can add up to an experience that’s either A) totally engrossing, or B) propels people straight toward the gift shop. During the weeks ahead, I’ll share my collection of basic (and hard-learned) pointers on writing for general audiences.  As a preview, here are four to keep in mind.

1.    Treat your visitors as if it’s Saturday — If your touch screen content and exhibit labels read like a textbook — or your audio and video content sounds like a lecture — you’ve already lost half of your audience. When writing for your visitors, treat it like a conversation, not a lesson plan.

2.    Lose the PowerPoint speak — It typically looks something like this: "Given the synergistic limitations on current storage management technology imposed by a heterogeneous archive infrastructure. . . .”  You get the idea. It’s the opposite of clear communication.  Don’t let it escape from your keyboard.

3.    Give your writing a personality — Modern life already bombards us with far too much bland, generic writing.  Show a little mercy.  Use a distinctive tone and voice that lets visitors know a living human being — not an android committee — created everything they’re reading, watching, and hearing.

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Growing a Community

Kris Haberman
By Kris Haberman
May 6, 2010
Design, User Experience

ESI Design created the brand identity and website for the new Naples Botanical Garden

The Naples Botanical Garden in Naples, Florida was a small garden before they started their expansion in 2008. They closed for two years and hired several well-known landscape architects to design a world-class botanical garden filled with subtropical plant treasures. The Garden also wanted to reinvent its mission, so ESI was invited to design a new online environment, graphics within the physical environment, and the branding — the invitation and identity of the Garden itself. 

From the start, we supported the Garden Committee’s efforts to build a community with local organizations and schools before the reopening. Many Garden supporters are “snowbirds” who winter in Naples, then return north. ESI created a website to reach that audience when they’re not in Naples.  People can see what’s blooming in the garden, read blogs written by Garden curators/staff, and leave their own mark by uploading photos of their own home gardens and of the Naples Botanical Garden itself.

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D’Arcangelo on Identity Design

Gideon D’Arcangelo
By Gideon D’Arcangelo
April 18, 2010
User Experience
Image of Sears.com Identity Sharing module

Sears.com Identity Sharing module

Digital identity is a fast emerging experience design issue. How we manage our identity reflects the internal aspect of social networking. The interfaces that we use to control how we meet the online world and enter into social spaces are still in primitive form. Our identities are scattered across so many domains – some very social, some fiercely private, some that we would inhabit only with our closest friends and family, some with our co-workers.

We need better tools to help us design our identity. We need better tools to help us shape how we present ourselves and choose what to make public and when, much like we choose what clothes to wear every day. In the coming months, I will be exploring the key challenges that come with designing these “identity tools.”

To start with, we need single sign-on to the universe. User-centric identity. You want to enter the Internet as you – and then have the choice to present which “you” you want to put forward, or roam anonymously. To do this, we need to consolidate all our disparate identities into one shared view. In this age of transparency and open architecture, progress has been made in standards for sharing identity, through OpenID and the Information Card approach (more on these later). Big players such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft Live, Apple and Yahoo, PayPal all are showing interest in opening up the identity market.

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