2. User Interface: Cool Globes
I wanted to make something very interactive, game-like, and fun, with an element of randomness, a bit like a fairground game, in the way you select a country.
The plan is simple - get a virtual globe on a big touchscreen that you swipe to spin it round (as fast as possible!). Where it stops, nobody knows, but that will be the chosen country. This is a cross between a 'strongman' game and roulette, and I think will have a great combination of skill, anticipation and chance.
In computing, we call this sort of thing User Interaction Design, or UI. It means making the way humans use computer programs as easy as possible, as there are often new and unfamiliar situations. I wanted to plan the UI at the beginning, to make it simple, fun, physical (the swiping), and maybe a tiny bit competitive.
In computing we also talk about User Experience, or UX. This is about what people do in a website, and how it makes you feel - happy, annoyed, frustrated, satisfied, and so on. With the globe, one important UX time is as the globe is slowing to a stop, and seeing where it will land. Will it be somewhere we know? Will it be somewhere we've been before? What will the new country reveal? Can we guess? This is designed to build up excitement for the content to come, which will have to be interesting and engaging!
In the next post I'm going to try to work out how to make this globe...
The plan is simple - get a virtual globe on a big touchscreen that you swipe to spin it round (as fast as possible!). Where it stops, nobody knows, but that will be the chosen country. This is a cross between a 'strongman' game and roulette, and I think will have a great combination of skill, anticipation and chance.
In computing, we call this sort of thing User Interaction Design, or UI. It means making the way humans use computer programs as easy as possible, as there are often new and unfamiliar situations. I wanted to plan the UI at the beginning, to make it simple, fun, physical (the swiping), and maybe a tiny bit competitive.
In computing we also talk about User Experience, or UX. This is about what people do in a website, and how it makes you feel - happy, annoyed, frustrated, satisfied, and so on. With the globe, one important UX time is as the globe is slowing to a stop, and seeing where it will land. Will it be somewhere we know? Will it be somewhere we've been before? What will the new country reveal? Can we guess? This is designed to build up excitement for the content to come, which will have to be interesting and engaging!
In the next post I'm going to try to work out how to make this globe...
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