Week 15 — Building Narratives
This week the team took a deep dive into many narrative aspects of the project starting with the presentation structure, the product video, user journey, and the branding. By working concurrently on all these different parts of our final deliverable at the same time we are hoping a strong narrative emerges that seamlessly ties the entire presentation together.
Presentation narrative
At Research Methods this week, we focused on crafting the why, what, how of our proposal. We used this process to start to define the main messages of our research process as well as our final proposed intervention.
One of the constraints we need to work with is the 10-minute cut off point. Having spent an entire semester researching, testing, and understanding our topic, we have a lot to say about the end of life. However, 10 minutes is a very short amount of time to convey all of these thoughts. Another thing we need to keep in mind is that our audience is not unfamiliar with our topic, so we need to focus on polish as well as tell an emotive and convincing story about why our idea should exist in the world.
With that constraint in mind, we started to draft out all the things we might want to include in the structure of our presentation and started to move them around to find the right fit. One unconventional technique we are thinking of employing is having a product video at the start to set the tone of our presentation before diving into the details about how we got there. Here is a look at our initial stab at the structure:
Product Video / Ad
We’ve continued working on our storyboard for our video this week. We’ve chosen a Beatles song — In My Life — as the score. We are planning to tell a story about life through photographs and memories. The team is still deciding if we should use the Beatles’ song as is, or use a spoken-word version or use the Johnny Cash version. We will play around this week to figure out whats the best fit for the tone of our video.
Through storyboarding we tried to imagine the placement of the photos and UI — building out the sequence. We’ve been sourcing photos from The Anonymous Project.
In the upcoming week, we will need to figure out the pace and flesh out the details of the story to fit into a 90 second video.
User Journey — User Interface — User Experience
Alongside the video, Michelle has been working on refining what the user journey on the interface could look like. What was successful about our previous presentation was the story about Zoe that was easy to follow. We are considering a similar approach to include here while going into more detail about certain features of the application.
Using the apple UI library we are building out elements of the app to look and feel like our native iPhone app.
For inspiration: We’ve been looking at different apple ads to see the motion and visual language used. We’ve noticed the use of bold fonts, limited colors, and really good use of white space.
Branding
Another important part of our proposal is the brand and naming. This week confirmed the name of the app— it’s going to “Life”. Anna had a crack at the initial look and feel for the app where she explore concepts such as the timeline. This led to the concept of a rainbow — we were immediately excited about this as the rainbow has many positive associations in different cultures. But it also has a strong link back to the original rainbow stripe apple logo!
Next week, in our final sprint we will continue refining towards our final presentation.
