Team | Carlo, Siebe, Gauke, Kate & Fleur
Project brief | Creating an interactive website concept
Project brief | Creating an interactive website concept
4.9.2007 | Brainstorming
Two main ideas
1) a website for exchanging books
you register, put your books into the database and browse for other books. if you want to borrow a book from someone else, you need a credit, which you get for lending a book. that is to make sure the system stays in balance.
you register, put your books into the database and browse for other books. if you want to borrow a book from someone else, you need a credit, which you get for lending a book. that is to make sure the system stays in balance.
2) this website is about »things to do except for being on the internet«
when you open the site, it gives you a random idea what you could do instead of just sitting there staring at the screen. you can’t do anything else on the site after that. there also could be categories for the activities and/or a rating system.
when you open the site, it gives you a random idea what you could do instead of just sitting there staring at the screen. you can’t do anything else on the site after that. there also could be categories for the activities and/or a rating system.
11.9.2007 | Research
"we totally dumped the first idea and looked at some sites similar to our second idea"
twitter.com
the users of this site type in what they are doing at the moment, e.g. »doing some serious stuff at the office«, »being bored in the history lesson«, etc.there also are some visualisations of these inputs, e.g. twittervision.com - which shows a world map with speech bubbles that pop-up, showing what twitter-users typed in in the last seconds.
43things.com
a website that collects things people want to do, e.g. »learn to make pancakes«, »be like Johnny Depp«, etc. it has a rating system that shows the number of people who want to do a specific thing. a visualisation shows the »most wanted« things in bigger and the »least wanted« things in smaller type.
Newsmap on marumushi.com
this website visualises news from news.google.com just with typography and colours.
"With this knowledge in mind — and things we found out during our research on »web 2.0« at home — we developed our idea further. "
the most important questions
_is the time that a user can spend on the site limited
_is the site not viewable for that user for the rest of the day?
_is the user presented with only one idea per session or can he browse through the whole database in categories?
_is there going to be one or more visualisations of the database: a world map that shows which things are done most in which countries, e.g. »in spain people eat a lot of salami and jump on their beds«; a pure typographic visualisation like »newsmap« on marumushi.com?
_is the site not viewable for that user for the rest of the day?
_is the user presented with only one idea per session or can he browse through the whole database in categories?
_is there going to be one or more visualisations of the database: a world map that shows which things are done most in which countries, e.g. »in spain people eat a lot of salami and jump on their beds«; a pure typographic visualisation like »newsmap« on marumushi.com?
we decided to follow two versions of our idea
1) the first being the very simple one which is limited in time and output, it gives one supposition for a thing to do to the user (and optionally the possibility to input an idea in return) and is really fast (thus »this will take 10 seconds«, our working title).
2) the second being a more complex visualisation of the database and/or a browser for the database, that lets users search and look through the list of ideas by categories and keywords/tags.
we made first sketches for the structure and the user interaction on the site.
We needed content
we felt like we had to come up with some sample content for our site, so these are things you could do when you’re not on the internet:
_think about the last person you knew that died
_splash water in your face
_go to the highest point in your country
_paint your nails orange
_write a dirty word in a public place
_whistle at construction workers
_buy a sandwich and give it to a homeless person
_make pancakes
_buy earrings for the cassiere at your local shop
_grow a moustache
_hug the biggest tree in your city
_sing your favourite song
_eat a hash cake
_throw a stone at a tree, ...
_splash water in your face
_go to the highest point in your country
_paint your nails orange
_write a dirty word in a public place
_whistle at construction workers
_buy a sandwich and give it to a homeless person
_make pancakes
_buy earrings for the cassiere at your local shop
_grow a moustache
_hug the biggest tree in your city
_sing your favourite song
_eat a hash cake
_throw a stone at a tree, ...
18.9.2007 | Concept
Today we narrowed the enormous amount of different ideas we had for our web2.0 project down to some basic ideas we can work with and combine and use in our concept.
The main thing we found out is that the most fun of our small assignments we give to the users is in the fact you can actually look at another one and another one. At first, this kind of screwed up our concept of wanting to have people leave the internet. But we figured out we still give them ideas of things to do besides sitting behind your computer and surfing and that it is more likely someone will actually take one of these things into practice if she or he gets more than just one assignment to choose from.
The idea now; people could make a choice between
_“I like this idea, i am going to do this!”
and
_ “That’s an awful idea, please give me a new one”
_“I like this idea, i am going to do this!”
and
_ “That’s an awful idea, please give me a new one”
when there given an assignment. We get the information about how many people clicked the “I like this idea” (+10pts.) and the “Awful idea” (-1pt.) and from that information we can determine which ideas are more popular than others.
This information all gets into a database in which the assignments are linked. So say you get an assignment like “Burn a cat,” and you like the “burn” part of the assignment but not the “cat” part (or vice versa), you can click on that particular word and you get all the assignments about that subject presented in order of relevancy.
Interactive Forum
We want to have an interactive forum on the website as well on which people can share experiences about the assignments they did or didn’t do and the assignments the users came up with.
Credits
We still haven’t decided on whether some sort of credit system should be part of the website with which registered people get rewarded if their idea gets chosen by a lot of people, which will be visible on the forum). This means we need to have some sort of login system for people to register.
Getting people to leave the website
Another very important part of the website is that you can search for information for a certain amount of time (let’s say ten minutes) and after that you get a pop-up which says “ten minutes ago we gave you an assignment…” and after that one that maybe says “What about going away now? mmmh?.” The amount of pop-ups will increase the longer you stay on the site, resulting in a system failure and the website getting crashed. This way people are still able to get information about certain subjects on the website while at the same time we still sort of force them to get the *#!@ out.
25.09.2007 | Final concept
We came up with two versions, from which we are most likely to take the second version, because that’s the version with the least things happening.
Disclaimer
we talked about having a disclaimer on the site, because it needs to be clear that we aren’t responsible for the things showing on the site, and people need to know what they are able to put on and what they can’t.
we talked about having a disclaimer on the site, because it needs to be clear that we aren’t responsible for the things showing on the site, and people need to know what they are able to put on and what they can’t.
a few options we talked about
_ a minimum and a maximum amount of characters.
_ make degrees of difficulty – which means that baking pancakes would be rated easy and saving mankind would be rated difficult, this would be rated by the people themselves.
_ put below every sentence “people who did this, also did …”, but for that to work we would need people to log in, and we said we didn’t want that.
_ a minimum and a maximum amount of characters.
_ make degrees of difficulty – which means that baking pancakes would be rated easy and saving mankind would be rated difficult, this would be rated by the people themselves.
_ put below every sentence “people who did this, also did …”, but for that to work we would need people to log in, and we said we didn’t want that.
Version 1
VERSION 1
The things you see on this site
_input idea _popularity
_(search) this we talked about, but in the end didn’t want it on the site
_every word you can click on, then you get another sentence with that word – we also thought of tags, so that the word you click on doesn’t need to be in the sentence, but is connected to it.
_okay, I do it
_no, next one
_report as inappropriate
_input idea _popularity
_(search) this we talked about, but in the end didn’t want it on the site
_every word you can click on, then you get another sentence with that word – we also thought of tags, so that the word you click on doesn’t need to be in the sentence, but is connected to it.
_okay, I do it
_no, next one
_report as inappropriate
Version 2
VERSION 2
In this version you see
_popularity
_every word you can click on, same story as above
_ok
_no, next
_inappropriate
_input idea
_disclaimer
_popularity
_every word you can click on, same story as above
_ok
_no, next
_inappropriate
_input idea
_disclaimer
the second version is the last, and what we thought the closest to our concept idea
FINAL RESULT | White-board style
