Final Project

Here is my Flash .swf file. The URL functionality may or may not work based on your Flash player security settings. In case it does not I have included the links for the wiki and VoiceThread used on the site:

flash swf:
http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_lesson/bike_trip_10.swf


voicethread:
http://voicethread.com/#u83423.b131790.i688662

wiki:
https://steins-wiki-site.wikispaces.com/Day+1+-+Yorktown%2C+VA+to+Glendale%2C+VA+%2870+miles%29

My Project Proposal

I did it in a Word Document so I'd rather post it as such:

http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_hand/stein_proj_proposal.doc

Web 2.0 Booth Crawl: Excellent Beer, Mediocre Content

I attended the booth crawl on Thursday from 4:30pm to 6:00pm. It was good timing as there was free beer for all in attendance. When I first entered the room I was reminded of how many of these shows I have attended. The familiar (and some not so familiar) logos of tech players and upstarts dotted the room. As with past shows, I was also reminded that these types of events end up being primarily brochureware. Of the exhibits that seemed relevant to my high school computer classes I ended up talking to marketing bunnies with enough information to get me to take a free t-shirt and the URL of their flagship product. One product that looked promising is the Jing Project by Techsmith, makers of Camtasia. I look forward to trying this cross-platform tool that captures video and screen capture. Other than that, no big suprises. But the beer tasted great! Next time I will attend some of the talks given by experts and hit the booth crawl for happy hour purposes.

lynda.com design critique

see it on my wiki site:

http://cyberstein.wetpaint.com/thread/1372002/lynda.com+design+review

PowerPoint on Play

Here is a copy of the PowerPoint I created about Play:

http://www.seq.org/~gstein/web_design/web_ext/Play.ppt

Also, here is a link to the Launchball game I will talk about in class:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/

Voicethread: Frustrating Faucet

This hotel faucet design obsures a critical piece of the shower experience: how to get water to flow out of the shower head and onto you. The designer figured you would need no visual affordance to know that pulling down on the end of the all-too-hidden bath faucet head would cause the shower, some four feet above, to spray water. The feedback itself (imagine if the nozzle were extended only partially and it wouldn't work) is mediocre at best as the fully extended state looks basically the same as the fully retracted state from the vantage point of a standing user. The mapping between an event with the bath faucet and the outcome on the shower head is also dubious, but forgiveable since users are accustomed to numerous traditional fixtures that also involve something to do with the bath faucet fixture. Seeing as how there are very few constraints on faucet design, I think designer did a bad job, especially for hotel users who have no prior experience with this type of system before or after ther stay. See an image and hear this same commentary at Voicethread:

http://voicethread.com/share/101378/

Greg's Picture Frame Story

See if you can guess what happened!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23980795@N06/sets/72157604333213968/