Well. At this point in time, we’re looking at only one Sprint left folks. Soon there’s gonna be a lot of celebrating (in the hugging/crying/beer-drinking form) but until then, we’ve got, ahem, a crazy-ton-load of work to do. To put it mildly. We’ve spent this past week trying to accomplish some of the things on our To-Do-Or-Die list, such as creating demos to pitch our ideas, which involved sorting through videos, creating hooks and some creative editing. We’ve also starting on our research poster, user tested at the OBA and had a few meetings. Oh, and we Peer Pitched, Sprint Reviewed and Retrospected as well (is that even a word?).
Oh hi.
Also, side note: There was a serious lack of photo-taking this week; oops. So, instead, you’re gonna get pictures of Nicholas Cage. Hope that’s alright.
Here we go.
One of the first things that we did this week was to create a demo that would better illustrate the goal of our new concept: to have landmark-based videos and hooks. So, Atossa sorted through some Sound and Vision videos and found ones suitable for the Volkshotel and the OBA. Then Lisanne created some text-based hooks and Shreya edited the videos to create the fun little demo you can watch here.
All smiles.
The first clip is a combination of: cloudy weather, someone has used #Volkshotel on Twitter, in the morning. The clip is nostalgic, it relates to some of the activities you can do at the Volkshotel, and the hook is non-intrusive. Perfect to show on a screen during breakfast. Or so we hope. The following clips follow the same formula: the videos are based on the weather and what #landmark someone has just Tweeted, and the hooks are more relative to someone’s mood during a particular time of day.
Oh boy.
Atossa and Orlando have also started working on the research poster. It’ll be a beautiful thing when it is finished, and they have been incorporating things like the an introduction to our project, the methods we have been using, key points of discussion and next steps. After that’s done, we’ll have a solid outline to move forward into the research paper. So exciting.
When we user test. This is accurate to the #feels.
On Thursday, we headed over to the OBA to do some last-minute user testing. We were super curious to see if our results would be similar to the Volkshotel (aka people just licking their elbows, everywhere). Unfortunately, the screen that we need to use (the one facing the street) isn’t working atm, so we improvised and tested on the screen that they have inside the OBA. Not exactly the same, but some OBA visitors we’re definitely stopping to watch the demo. Holla…
So excited.
Our research geniuses also had a Skype meeting with Guusje Hallema, someone we’ve been trying to talk to for a while now. Totally worth the wait. We got insights such as how we need to start conducting more structured interviews when we ask users about the effectiveness of our design. In this way, hopefully we will be able to generalize our results and have some concrete feedback to build off of. Nice.
Just creepy.
Our (last, ever) Peer Pitch was a bit different that unusual; Orlando and Nikhil presented together (for the first time ever, #bropower) and we were only pitching to the Publishing Tools team instead of all of the groups. Our audience may have been smaller, but the feedback was super valuable, as always. One of the main things that we need to consider is the automization of our project: do we have to manually sort through and place hooks on videos, or can we use programming to basically do it for us in an effective way? We shall see…
Oh my.
Our Sprint Review on Friday morning was, well, pretty intense. Our stakeholders from OBA really thought we were onto something (=awesome), as our new idea has the potential to grab someone’s attention. However… we need to still consider things like: who is viewing the screen, and how will it have an impact on them? After #allofthefeels, we sat down with Gijs, as we do, to Retrospect. We’ve basically got to go full throttle as we move forward into our last few weeks at the lab. Gijs recommended that we get someone to help out with all of the technical stuff we need to do. We are also going to create “manuals”, where we provide a basic outline of what each screen would contain depending on where it is located, and start looking into how we can categorize our hooks so that they are more effective at different locations. Fun times.
So much.
Will we be able to do it? Will we be able to drink enough coffee? Code enough lines? Cite enough sources? Be able to package this project and sell it off before all hell breaks loose? C’mon. Guys. We’re Project Encounter. ‘Nuff said.