Making things fast
Two sandbox days under our belts and we are now fully in the thick of things. Lots of talking but also lots of getting on with stuff. The call to arms we were given at the start of the sandbox from Leila Johnston is working.
Our technology partner from 383 project, is already on version 2 of our wireframe document and version 3 is in process. The likelihood is that there wiil be several more iterations before we settle on the final structure. This is as it should be and it's pleasing to see how the processes of interaction design and fim-making are rubbing up against each other to push us in new directions.
Respect to Kim Plowright for the workshop on audience that she delivered at the second Future Doc sandbox. It was the perfect moment for us to work through our assumptions about core and secondary audiences and has really got us thinking. Why should anyone be interested in visiting our web portal, let alone participate in uploading content and developing tribute materials? Being asked to build a narrative around user experience was really helpful.
We now have a whole list of questions around the things our users might be feeling pre, during and after visiting our portal, and we have come up with a strategy for engaging casual visitors as well as committed fans. This was an issue that had been troubling me and on which Clare Reddington really pushed us. Having raised lots of questions, the real challenge now is to find solutions through deepening the nature and scope of our audience research.
This will be the core focus of our activities over the next couple weeks in the run-up to the next Sandbox day. Jeanie has already begun this process by paying a visit to the Porthcawl Elvis Fest, where our sense that irony and kitsch are not the right ways to approach this project was re-confirmed. What is it that inspires people to become fans and to extend this into creating tributes? How can we create work that taps into this in a genuinely meaningful way?
One final thought, a top representative from Twitter was at a screening of Hip Hop Hoax in Dublin. Jeanie got talking to him and he offered to send her analytics for mentions of Elvis on Twitter. The graphs he's sent through show that, on Twitter, Elvis is bigger than the Beatles. If we can bring Elvis fans over to Orion, the potential audience for this project is massive. No assumptions to be made here though. If we get the ask wrong, then there will be no buy-in to the project.
Time to start applying my skills as an anthropologist to feel my way into thinking like a fan.
Porthcawl Elvis Fest 2013 - courtesy of Jeanie.
