2 Man Mission Complete

Myself and Lindsey presented our completed Flash timeline to our client. Overall, he was very pleased with the outcome. We gave him some copies of the cdrom of the timeline, and it seemed to work well on his older version of PC. He liked how when you click on e.g. community, a new timeline background slides into view. The popups were just how he liked them, and were clear as when they are clicked on to popup, everything else on the timeline is faded into the background. He especially liked the interview for which he had given us assets for, as it made the story more personal. One point he did make was that at first it is not completely clear what the user has to click on. However, he did say that the pulsing speechbubbles makes it alittle easier to understand that you need to click on them.

For future development we could enhance the instructions by showing an animation that demonstrates what the user has to do to view each story. It was discussed in the meeting with the client, that in the future we could add more interviews to the cdrom, if he has more assets, i.e. more photographs of each interviewee.

This is the completed look of the timeline:

The timeline can be viewed online at:

http://www.d10dev-studio.com/ZoeBritnell/cdweb/howfar6.html

2 Man Brief Mission Build

The build of the Flash timeline for the Riverside charity began with the development of the a sliding menu. This fitted in well with what we needed to achieve for displaying each interview. I also developed an XML file to store all the text for the interviews and to dynamically pull in the jpg files for the images in the timeline. It was a very good exercise to learn more about XML, and how to structure the file and pull in information dynamically. We eventually decided to have 5 separate images for each section of the interview, i.e. for Home, School, Work, Community, and Future. There is also a separate background for each interview.

Mission 2 Man Brief

We were given our 2 man briefs. I am working with Lindsey and we chose the brief for Riverside Community Centre in Cardiff. This brief relates to Riverside's 'How Far?' project. How Far? is a project which records the 'distance travelled' in people's life long learning. This involves interviews being conducted with individuals. They are asked what they found was ok and not ok with what they experienced and learned in life. This is grouped under the headings of what they learned/experienced at Home, School, Work, in their Community, and what they hope for in the Future.

The Riverside community has been an independent charity running for 30 years. It has been an education provider for 5 years. There has been a focus on women, due to initially a direction of tackling gender inequality since the 1970s. But now they are working with men as well as women and minority communities. They are currently running I.T. lessons for the elderly Chinese community.

We had a meeting at Riverside with Allan Herbert. We discussed how to put Allan's Word document timeline which illustrates people's learning experiences, into a more interactive format:

· Allan stated that he would like a timeline representing someone’s life of learning, in an interactive and visual way.

· He would like it to be ideally easily updatable, a cd rom, that he could give as a tool to people to record the interviews.

· He liked the idea of clicking on part of someone’s story and more information appearing a box that zooms into view.

· The VLSC and European logos need to be on the Flash component.

This was a productive meeting, in particular with regard to learning about the client process. It was initially quite hard to unpack what the client was after. Also, Allan eventually wants a software application which the timeline would be an updatable template that people could just add their stories and text by clicking directly onto the speech bubbles and popups.