24 Jul 2009 FRI - Meeting with Feargal about Design Spec

Today we had an important meeting with Feargal to discuss our Design Spec. We brought in all our design mockups and Design Spec concepts and gave him an overview of our project, showing him the different content we collected, our aims and our methodology. We told Feargal about our concern that we had jumped in too early into the aesthetics of the interface without thinking about the end user and the content. Feargal quickly picked up on the fact that, although we intended to avoid an informational approach, our project was in a certain way "patronising" the user through the use of icons, 3d axonometric layouts and pop up panels. He believes that our content serves a much more artistic and exploratory approach to the building, and that should be reflected in the interface, which should not overwhelm the content, but rather support it and remain in the background. During the meeting with Feargal, we showed him one of the initial ideas, with a very faded campus map highlighting the circulation paths we collected, and Feargal said that the simplicity of it highlighted our content without resorting to icons, pop up panels or explanatory aids.

We had a group meeting between us after and decided to redesign the Design Spec before building the interface. So hopefully by Monday we will have the Design Spec sorted out and move on to building the interface.

Marcos.