Home page for Nutsy Bolts

I’ve had a lot of fun and gotten so much experience creating this.  It just started as an experiment to teach myself AJAX (and this was back in pre-jQuery days, so I taught myself the nitty-gritty of it all), but it grew into so much more than that.  I started doing some graphic design stuff, experimenting with bright, contrasting colors and layout.  I built the design from scratch in Photoshop, then figured out how to squeeze it into HTML/CSS, with a tableless layout and everything.  Then I did another graphic redesign from scratch, sticking to a few general principles, imagining what the game might look like if I made a physical version, and making sure to flout every principle of so-called “Web 2.0″ design.  I also learned about the complexities of architecture needed for a multi-user networked application like this one.  (I’m really glad I learned about threading in undergrad!)  I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to learn about maintaining a live application and a community as well, once this goes live.

Anyway, most of my readers already know about this, but I am basically constantly looking for people to playtest.  I seem to have ironed out most of the showstopping bugs for now, but it’s always great to get people’s feedback for the future, and on top of that I’d like to give it a stress test to make sure it won’t come screeching to a halt when more than 10 people try to play.  Always a good thing to know!

I had a few good takeaway points based on what we saw over the course of the week:

• Explain new technology completely.  Whenver you have a new technology or interaction technique that requires users to do some action that they’re unfamiliar with, education becomes your top priority.  Barcodes also do not naturally afford doing anything, meaning that users cannot learn on their own and must be taught directly.  We decided that a single instructional poster would help teach users better than explaining what a tag was on every single tag.  In this case though, it is absolutely critical to make as many visitors notice the instructional poster as possible, since if they miss it, they will never learn.
• Sanity-check your instructions.  In our user tests, we found a lot of small problems that didn’t occur to us as we designed the poster.  One of the biggest sources of confusion we encountered was that users weren’t sure what to take a picture of.  Some users tried to take a picture of the exhibits themselves, and some tried to take a picture of both the tag and its caption.  We had a few other similar difficulties,  which we would not have been able to debug if we didn’t test it with real people.
• Use barcodes to provide additional value.  We tend to think of technology as a replacement for traditional methods, whereas in some cases it’s better used as an augmentation to these methods (a topic I’ll cover in more detail later on).  As implemented, the barcodes in the planetarium simply displayed a block of text when accessed.  Some users said that this text could just as easily be shown in print next to the exhibit, and that displaying it in print would be much more accessible.  The big wins for barcodes are in offering access to things that can’t be done in print – interactive models, super-high resolution graphics, annotations, related content, etc.  

As always, I’m fascinated how real people react to new technology.  It’s so easy to forget that as exciting as technology like HCCB is, most people don’t know anything about it.  It shows me that we need research not just in the back room trying to build new technology, but also out in the world debugging it and seeing what people do with it.  Overall, I was thrilled for the opportunity to work at Adler, and look forward to see what they do with our work!