Below is a representation of the general process we followed, most will be familiar with the basics of a general iterative design process. While we did not employ every method listed below, we were able to use it as a reference throughout the project.
A consistent thread for our group was to set very quick milestones. From the beginning generative stages through to the prototyping, these weekly milestones allowed us to demonstrate progress and keep focused on our core goals with the project.
Research
Below are the slides from our first presentation where we had the general idea of what we wanted to do, but as you can see it's very thin on specifics. At this point, we were calibrating the "big vision" of our project and setting up the fuzzy boundaries for what would become Social Locale.
Below is a representation of the general process we followed, most will be familiar with the basics of a general iterative design process. While we did not employ every method listed below, we were able to use it as a reference throughout the project.
Sketching played an important role throughout the entire project, as it allowed all of us to quickly communicate various ideas.
User Research
Social Locale is a point of purchase social media system. It allows users to engage public spaces in a whole new, interactive, way. And it allows the owners of those spaces to engage with their customers in a whole new way.
The display is what the user sees and interacts with, although keep in mind they interact with this screen using their own device via whatever service they prefer to update their social graph via location data with.
Prototyping
Prototyping was an integral part of our process. Within two weeks we had our first prototype to work with. Naturally, it was buggy, very basic, and didn't look all that good, but this process was invaluable in giving us all commong ground from which to discuss scope and architecture. It also allowed us to more fully explore the various visions we had for this product and work toward unifying them all.
Part of the prototyping approach was to figure out what technological material we wanted to work with. It began as WebGL, then C++, and then finally we landed on a mix of Ruby on Rails and HTML5. The benefit of sticking with a web based approach is that we can quickly test out ideas, it's easy and flexible to work with, and fits our model of targeting displays very well.
