If you call the earlier LT experience assignment a nightmare assignment, this must be the mother of all nightmares – one that you never seem to wake up from. I mean, it’s a lot of work. Testing after testing after testing, and more testing. But on hindsight, it’s through the hands on application of all things taught in class that you really learn more and absorb far beyond the typical theoretical sit-down-and-listen classes.
Fortunately, I had a team of 2 really tech savvy guys – Chee Boon and Alvin – and they really made things easier. For those who gasp, it’s them who created the flash animations. What I could only do was to come up with the graphics and prior to that, I never really expect that the graphics that I’ve done could exude that kind of feeling. They surely did take my breath away as much as they did to yours. If anything, that must be the experience factor that we have been talking about through the course.
We didn’t start easy of course. Many of our ideas were trashed right from the start of our first statement. I guess Mr Reddy had seen so much over the years, he seems to know what’s up our minds and many of our ideas were thrown out of the windows in a jiffy. Like Chee Boon’s female urinal idea, or my 2-in-1 toothbrush and toothpaste idea. I am sure till date, we both secretly still think our idea will work. But in Reddy’s words,
Think of the idea/concept, not the product.
And so we did and finally zeroed in on Park.A.Lot™ and after moulding it into shape the last few weeks, our random pebble has turned a gem in my opinion.
Throughout the module, one design dilemma that I acquired from my other design class (NM5206), albeit the theoretical one, kept surfacing. Do you design by committee, or design by individual (one with foresight to lead the team)?
For design of this project, it is probably more of the latter. I could remember struggling with the graphics ‘cause the black background and graphical images conceptualised by Boon just isn’t my “style”. And it got difficult at some juncture that you simply couldn’t capture the “feel” despite working on the same page repeatedly. I believe in “flow”, my term for implying that once you’ve capture the feel of the overall design, the rest of the inspirations just come at the snap of the fingers (Voila!).
But we pushed on with the theme, with belief in his artistic impression. Refining big time along the away and I’ve to say it really turned out to be pretty impressive, and suitable for a high tech product like ours.
I could really see it executable, and in terms of the experience aspects, it seems we covered most grounds (not all ’cause there’s always room for improvement yea). Perhaps we could really bring it into execution one of these days. If you see the Book.A.Lot™ service up one day, don’t doubt, it’s probably one of us behind it. And please do not hesitate trying out the service, we’ll be sure to bring you the experience factor. : )
As a finale, revisiting one of the slides in our very first presentation:
Tags: female urinal, Park.A.Lot™, testing, toothpaste-toothbrush
