Going Green Website: Initial Design and Feedback

So it is time to post some feed back over a little flash program we’re cooking up for the interactive portion of our animation class and after presenting the initial idea to the class we were required to take the feedback and mull over it while we implemented changes to the design that address the points raised by the class. The Original pitch is below:

Now there is never going to be a perfect example of an initial concept for a design and this is no exception as my colleagues have dutifully pointed out the flaws in this current design.

1.       The way the wheel is designed, the arrows can only go in one direction, and it might be a good idea to have them g both ways.

2.       Perhaps a way to quickly navigate to each room as oppose to going in sequence, possibly giving them their own space in the wheel menu as well as colour coding the rooms appropriately to give them distinguishable features.

3.       Make something that can serve as a home page with a bit of a tutorial to guide people to the interactive elements in the work.

4.       Give the piece of work some branding, this gives the work something the people viewing can easily associate with that particular experience.

In response to these criticisms I came up with this piece of work, a more refined concept though not the whole picture and sadly, lacking colour.

How the previous criticisms were addressed (or not addressed in some cases) is as follows:

1.       Giving the arrow a backwards button seemed contrary to the idea of someone going through the house in a linear fashion. The design for the arrow would no longer be reminiscent of the arrows used in every recycling logo that the target audience would be able to identify and associate to going green.

2.       This is one I do believe in as a person should never feel like they have to stick to the rails so in the wheel I added a slider that would have icons or text for the three different settings for quick navigation if they really wanted to jump to a specific scene, this also means that they wouldn’t have to go back in the sequence creating unnecessary load times for the user.

3.       This is something I wanted to address with its own screen as creating any one of these images as a home page would detract from the other two or clutter up the screen of the chosen setting which is something I would like to avoid.

4.       When it comes to branding the piece that I would associate with the brand would be the wheel although a phrase could be added to that or a heading.

There's more work to come down the pipeline but for now it serves nicely as an initial concept page.