Uses of the home button in UX design

I really enjoyed this article, I thought it raised some interesting questions about the way websites are designed and whether technology has moved on.

http://uxmag.com/articles/are-you-putting-the-home-button-to-good-use?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=ArticleShare&utm_tone=sf

SEO assignment

As part of an assignment for another class, I created this blog:

http://creative-multimedia-programming.blogspot.ie/

Please check it out!

Sound editing for Flash

One of the disadvantages of working with Flash is that its sound editing controls are very basic. You can change the volume of each channel, allow the sound to come from left or right, but not very much else. I had a lot of sounds that I wanted to clip for specific parts of my animation, so I brought them into Adobe Audition and did it there. It's a nice user friendly piece of software. As I had already worked with sound editing software, it was quite easy to get used to Audition. It allowed me to create sound clips to fit to specific parts of my animation, and then in Flash I adjusted the volume levels where needed. I used lynda.com tutorials to fill any gaps in my knowledge with regard to the controls and the interface. The sound made the finished film much better.

iPad eLearning assignment

Working in a group with Michelle, Keith and Christina, we came up with an elearning app for an iPad to demonstrate to children between 5 and 7 how to use colour using a dynamic iPad interface. We did some research on children of this age group to create personas. This helped us to target our app and to develop with this research in mind. Below are the personas:

We wanted the kids to be able to have fun while being creative, so the app involves mixing colours and adding them to a scene. As the child gets more confident, their skill level progresses and they are given more options - they are told to figure out how to mix the colours they need, and eventually they progress to creating whole scenes on their own. We focused on friendly sprites (including a logo of a blob of paint called Splodgy) and fun in learning. The opening interface allows a child to choose their skill level and then the next screen allows them to get creative.

It was a great experience to develop and research this project up to the prototype stage. It was also a valuable experience of working in a team; we delegated various parts of the project (I had responsibility for writing up the specification, Christina handled the personas, Michelle designed the interface and Keith did the navigation and logo) and it was a good opportunity to get to know how we work together. Our team got on very well together and listened to the suggestions of others - effort was made from the start to make the project work.

Moodboard - Flash Animation

I wanted bright colours and cartoon-style design for my Flash Animation Project, because the primary audience for this nursery rhyme animation is young children. I wanted bright colours to keep their attention and simple cartoon sprites. This is the moodboard I created to get the feel of the project on paper:

I took inspiration from previous representation of the story as well and contemporary cartoons that get the point across. I'm mostly drawn to cute little animal drawings and that's what I tried to recreate in my own characters.

Flash animation - Pop goes the weasel

Scenery, characters and the first scene of my Flash Animation, Pop Goes the Weasel.

 

Storyboards

Unfortunately the scans of these images are a bit light. It was really useful to go through the storyboarding process. It helped me visualize the project and come up with ideas as to how to get the story to work as an animation. It was really a problem-solving exercise in that respect, resolving the problem of how to translate the story in my head to something that would be interesting, education and fun for the end users, ie. children learning nursery rhymes. I'm looking forward to getting this working in Flash.

Class work: Morphing

In class last week I learned to morph shapes and colours in Flash. Knowing how this process works gives a really good understanding of some of the techniques needed to animate. Knowing how to use shape hints is really useful, as is shape tweening. There were a few complications, in that if the shape hints weren't perfectly positioned the objects got flipped in all sort of weird ways, but as long as they're in the right order it leads to an interesting piece of animation.

Morphing from a purple circle to a yellow square. Placing the shape hints on the top corners ensures the correct orientation of the animation.

Transitioning from a rectangle to an oval to a hexagon, going through several colours in the process.

Flash animation: inverse kinematics and audio

I just did the tutorials on lynda.com for IK and inserting audio into Flash animations. The audio is fairly straightforward; we've done it in a lot of the tutorials with Denise already but it's never any harm to reinforce things. The IK tutorials were great, it's a really good way of putting the life into your animations. It's similar to 3DS max, but a lot less complicated. There's also the option of creating runtime animation, where your user can alter the animation of the finished movie within Flash player, which is really cool, particularly if you want to develop games.

This shows the bone tool in use. You can adjust the positioning of each bone to get realistic movement of joints.

This is the timeline of the animation after it's been converted to frame-by-frame animation so it can be played in older versions of Flash player which don't support IK.

This is a still from a movie where the runtime feature is enabled; I used the mouse to click inside the finished animation and move the monkey.

Another example picture.

 

Redesigning the mobile experience

The assignment given was to redesign your phone to fit your needs perfectly. Now, I have a newish Nokia Lumia 800 and I love it so I found it quite hard to think of ways in which to improve it! I really like the graphic interface - the use of nice geometric squares to organise your information.

I kept this aspect of the design but I changed the orientation of the squares to be diamonds, and I stripped down the interface a little to include only my most used features. I also added texture to the tiles to give the impression they are being indented when you touch them - a little throwback to the day when we all used buttons :) I gave access to connectivity and volume buttons from the home screen because I don't like having to go into my settings to access them.

I then changed the messaging interface; I like the possibility of having my text messages, voice mails and emails all in the same place, so that's what I did.

Finally I redesigned the sleep screen. Like many people, I use my phone as a replacement watch as well, so I placed the time and date prominently on the screen. If there are messages the user hasn't read, a notification appears on the screen. I also added weather and the moon phase, as I'm interested in astronomy and it's never any harm to know when the next full moon in :)

My initial sketches for the project are below:

 

More fun in Flash

Today we did two more Flash tutorials, in which we used sounds as well as images to create interesting effects. The first one we did was a keyboard with a different sound for each key, we did it very quickly in class so mine doesn't look spectacular but it sounds pretty cool. We also added functionality where the colour changes when you roll over the key.

We also created a website in Flash with some slick animation and nice sounds. We got our assignment today to create a Flash animation of a movie or nursery rhyme. I'm looking forward to it, it should be fun.

Phone interface design

For this project we are redesigning our own phones. Unfortunately for this assignment, I love my phone and would change very little :) I did some sketches last week and then did  another one in class today. The final design is not yet complete; I'll be working on this some more tonight I expect.

Above is today's design, below are the ones I did last week.

Starting off with Flash

We had our first Flash tutorial today, and I really enjoyed it. We created an animation of a fish swimming in the sea, complete with functional buttons. The animation process isn't significantly different from using 3DS Max, insofar as it relies heavily on key frames and tweening. I'm really going to enjoy working with this.

I completed another tutorial after class as well. I really like the possibilities of this programme.

Portfolio

Just got my portfolio finished today and am quite happy with it. I muted the colours slightly from what I had originally, as I just preferred a slightly darker aesthetic. I loaded it into a PDF file from Illustrator, although one of my pages wouldn't load together with the others so I had to do that separately and then combine the two. Unfortunately the PDF file won't fit onto either Issuu or Moodle so I'll need to find a way around that this week.

CV design

 

This is the final version of the CV I've uploaded. I'm much happier with this, it's much brighter.

CV redesign

So I did some a bit of a redesign on the CV I initially had. I've also done some more examples which I will upload later. This one is based on a Super Mario Galaxy theme; I created the Luma sprites in Illustrator. It just livens up the old design a little bit.