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Summer 07 – Usability – Competitive Analysis
I’ve been exploring many websites lately that are either featuring movies, or other media that focuses on entertainment and branding. I’ll be attaching the pdf that summarizes my competitive analysis. Here is the link to the Compettive Analysis.
I realize the most important thing my website should include to fall under the “movie website” category is the downloadable media. Meaning, the user can find links to IM icons, wallpapers, galleries, and screen savers. These are symbols that will point the user in the right direction.
Summer 07 – Usability – Project Objective (redefining it)
After looking at my project once more, and expanding my competitive analysis, I realize I should be doing a movie website instead of an interactive CD-ROM. The movie website is a well-defined genre that will allow the user to understand the product better, will stray from the “game” tendency CD-ROMs tend to favor, and will have a higher relevance in a world where high-speed connections allow heavier content usage.
Project Objective:
A. Overall Objective:
The Mantis in Pantis website will be part of a press kit presented as a marketing tool to pitch the show to Adult Swim. This interactive market-
ing piece will include an interface made in Flash that will take the user on a journey through the Mantis in Pantis world.
B: User goals and needs:
The user needs to be educated about the Mantis in Pantis cartoon series. The goal is that by the end of the website experience, the user has gained a better understanding of what the show is about. The user will either become a fan of the show, or become an investor, or give the creator of the website a job.
C. Stakeholders and their needs:
There are 3 different types of clients: The primary user who is a fan of the show (or will be after exploring the website). There’s the secondary user, who are the possible investors that will be interested in making the show a reality. And there’s the tertiary audience, who are clients interested in seeing the website as part of my portfolio.
D. Business/Organization goals:
To get sponsored, produced, and distributed.
E. Usability Objective:
It is not a website meant for repetitive use, although users might come back to see it a few times. It is a marketing tool. Form doesn’t follow function here. The function is an excuse for the form. In usability testing, the users will need to see if the hidden easter eggs are just “too†hidden to make sense.
F. Function Objective.
The user is going to view and download media. Things to be found are wallpapers, images, screensavers, IM icons, and music. I wish to have a combination of things that are easily accessed through a menu, and also some things that the user just needs to discover because their placement will not be as obvious.
Summer 07 – Usability – Mantis navigation story.
I’m exploring the possibility of making the mantis interactive CD-Rom be more like a game. In this game, the user would receive suggestions made by the system that will unify the experience. As I modified my thesis’ proposal, I added the game as a way of consolidating the mantis world.
This is what I came up with:
Possible Detective Story
1. The user is going to be encouraged to visit the Character House (where the mantis live). The house is going to blink. In fact, the different places that the user should be entering are going to blink in the right order.
2. Inside the house, as we take a tour, we realize the mantis’ panties are missing. Where could they be? Someone encourages the user to visit the Tarot Institute to ask the psychic where they are.
3. The psychic says she knows why you are here, and says to visit the Contact Booth to receive a mysterious phone call that will lead you to the stolen panties.
4. Once at the booth, the user gets a phone call, and a voice says, “So, you want to buy movie tickets?” The user says no… but the voice says, “Great. I’ll be selling them for half price outside the City Hall Library.” After this, the person hangs up.
5. Once at the library, the user buys the movie tickets, and visit the Cartoon Theatre, where they watch the mantis movies.
6. Outside the theatre, Tom Kat tells the user to pay Dr. Walrusky a visit at the Peeping Tower… since he lives on high grounds, and has binoculars that can view everywhere in the city. Maybe from there he can see who’s using the notorious panties.
7. One of the windows we’ll spy on will have Jr. wearing the panties. Aha, crime solved.
Summer 07 – Usability – User archetypes
The following are the user archetype profiles I’ve created to understand my audience better. These are the Mantis User Archetypes.
The first three ones are based on my primary users: college kids and older geeky fans. My example for a secondary user is an employer, while my tertiary user is an investor.
-Alex
Meet the Taxi driver: another chapter of the incredible Marla/Jack
omg… strangest dream / nightmare
Marla’s deterioration had continued. Her “semblaje” more similar to the one of a sick person, it was not difficult to tell she was a drug addict.
I see this horrible monstrous looking man in the street. We just walk by him, but I paid close attention to him as he approaches some people on the street who clearly have the drugs he’s in search for. He scores.
Later on in the night, Marla and I take a taxi, the man just looks strangely familiar. All I know is that she sat in front because of I-dont-know-what. The taxi driver was giving us small talk, to which I just reacted by looking out the window. The view was fantastic; water surrounded us in a night-time beach route. I didn’t feel like I had to be “on.”
It is one of those nights in which Marla wants to sleep alone, so they drop me off first because my place is nearer. Unfortunately, I don’t think anything bad of it because, even though Marla was talking animately, it wasn’t too much as to trouble me.
Before I leave the taxi, I noticed the driver was the man scoring on the streets from before. He looked better, apparently the immediate shit-faced effect of the drug had faded. I’m sure he thinks I don’t talk to him out of arrogance. From my part, I was just tired and annoyed by men in general.
Now this is the part that starts to become blur, because I don’t know if this is me visiting Matt or Ross… or if it was just a phone conversation, point is that I know it is the next day, and I’m talking with either one of my two best friends. The details of the conversation seem banal, but I’m sure I was recalling the pleasantness of the beach, and how there might have been even fireworks at the distance. The type of place you only visit in a CGI world or in a dream. Clearly in my case, is the later.
At some point Diana calls me with a sad tone of voice. The same tone of voice people use to tell you that someone you love has died. I ask what’s wrong, to which she replies that Marla just called her and told her to tell me that she had met someone. That someone was the taxi driver. After they dropped me off, apparently they had a conversation that lasted for hours, one of those conversations in which without knowing the person, you quickly determine you both are soul-mates, and that you should transform your life to fit the other in smoothly.
I’m just enraged by what I hear, and determined to prove it was just a dream, I set off into this imaginary world to find Marla at her house and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. As I get there, she’s half fucked up, but not too much to not know what she’s doing. Her insensitive actions clearly are masked by her sweet yet as as-a-matter-of-fact voice. She tells me she wants to get to know this taxi driver better, and that they really hit it off. I’m just crushed… How could this happen on my watch? How can he be so unfair to steal my gf right in front of my face? How dare he use his unethical position as a taxi driver to have a captive audience on which he could hit on? My immediate question is the sex question? Did they have sex? To which Marla replies that they want to wait.
At this moment, I’m just losing control. She says something about going on a vacation with him, since the near future has in store a singles vacation, remnant of his pre-Marla schedule. Did she try to tell me they’ll do it then? It doesn’t matter because I cant take this anymore. I react by beating the shit out of her. To an innocent bystander, she might appear to be weaponless. But the reality is that the cell phone in her hands quiet easily dialed 911. And because of the to-the-point nature of dreams, she didn’t have to tell the dispatcher anything (in fact, she didnt even give her address) for the police to magically be well-informed of what happened. And if I wouldn’t have decided to wake up in that very instant, the police might have barged in to interrupt the beating as fast as a minute later.
I woke up devastated, but happy to know it was all a dream. Because it was all so lucid, and because it is the first dream in a long time to which I wake up remembering most of it, I decide to slide out of Marla’s arms to find my fingers typing away my fake experience.
-Jack
