Paper Prototype

The initial concept and envisioned look of the application are well-represented by the paper prototype developed earlier in the semester. Below are photos of sequential stages in the prototype, with annotations directly below each.

In the first screen, the user has the opportunity to enter their name on an opening screen, with a background that includes some of the works from the Davis Museum's collection. To enter the application, having added their name, the user presses the "Enter" button.

The next screen displays buttons by which the user may choose the floor that they are on, and glowing dots to indicate where there are works of art on the floor. By pressing on one of the dots, a small version of the work of art will appear. The purpose of this is so that the user can clarify what artwork they have chosen. If they would like to advance to responding at the artwork, they can press this small version of the work.

This will bring the user to a larger version of the piece, with tombstone information, a prompt and a text box into which they can input their response. Upon completing it, they press the button to save their input.

This causes the button's text to change, and upon pressing the changed button, the user is able to view the rest of the responses saved for that image.

The collection of responses are scattered across the screen in miniature. Upon pressing one of them, the user will be able to look at it more closely.

Looking at a selected response allows the user to see who added that response, what content it was, and what they were responding to. Afterwards they can press the button to return to the previous screen.

Prototyping the Look and Feel

When prototyping the look and feel, I wasn’t yet comfortable or adequately familiar with the iPhone’s model-view-controller arrangement, and so I developed every “screen” within one view controller, something I found to be a drawback soon after this phase of development. However, this was a positive chance to experiment with the look and feel and a horizontal system (something that I retired in a later phase of development), so that I could determine the best system for managing views later and have some sense of the application’s desired aesthetic.

The above image shows the login screen. Here I experimented with background imagery and the general aesthetic by creating the image in Photoshop.

To choose a floor, the user interacts with UIButtons (one per floor). This changes the content of the UIImageView.

The above image demonstrates the appearance of a work of art as a bubble on the selected floor.

Upon choosing a work of art, the user sees some of its most basic tombstone information and a prompt, with a text box that they can reply in.

When they hit the submit button, the response is saved and they can view responses by hitting the according UIButton. However, this prototype stopped being developed here, as I backtracked in order to focus on the style of interaction and the view controller architecture.

Reflections

After developing this prototype, as mentioned above, it became obvious that I needed to revise the back-end architecture so as to make this a more scalable application. However, it also became clear that the type of interface I was devising was not unfamiliar to the iPhone SDK, and in fact the built in UINavigationController and UISegmentedControl could allow me to elegantly do what I was attempting to do with mere UIButtons. Furthermore, the horizontal method of viewing was not as economical as I had hoped. Having reflected on the drawbacks of the interaction style, the architecture and the layout, I went back and revamped these features for the functional prototype. To see what this evolved into, visit the functional prototype's page.