A solution doesn't start with a site–map any more than it ends with an application deployed on a server — It starts and ends with the outcomes you want to achive in the real world.
To complete this round trip we need to work closely with our clients, asking the right questions, testing what we create and taking the needs of all stakeholders into account. The surprise is how little effort is required to do all these things properly, and how greatly it improves the result.
In the rush to close a deal the traditional software engagement can resemble an encounter with a press gang: you barely get a few words in before you're hit over the head, wake up in the hold of a ship, and arrive six months later at a destination that you'd better like because it's too late to change your mind.
At RocketBoots we see the start of a solution engagement as more of a match–making process, ensuring that expectations about outcomes and the process we use to deliver them are explained and aligned. We strongly belive that great solutions start with clear, open engagment practices.
Once underway our solutions always follow a staged approach, allowing regular, opportunities for our clients to adjust priorities to meet changing conditions and control costs and risk.
No-one knows your business better than you, but articulating the details of how your business works now and how you want it to work in future is not a trivial task. What kind of problem are you trying to solve? Is there only one problem, or a combination of related problems? Who are your users, what information are you working with, how does this information change over time — and how do you know when to stop asking questions? No matter what technology or methodology is used to develop a solution, at some point these questions must be answered, and then clearly framed and presented to ensure that the answers are understood by everyone involved in its delivery.
RocketBoots uses an elegant and powerful approach called requirements patterns to help recognise new permutations of familiar software problems, determine the list of questions we need to answer and how to then arrange these answers for maximum clarity. We find that this process helps our clients to understand their own business better, to the extent that on several occasions our clients have requested that the scope of the analysis be extended beyond the scope of the solution.
The following video is based on a presentation RocketBoots CTO Robin Hilliard delivered at the WebDU 2010 conference, and introduces the concept of requirement patterns.
RocketBoots consultants are truly experienced in user experience design and usability testing for Flash, Flex and web applications. From functional design, wire-framing and prototypes to the implementation details of styling and transition effects, our consultants can imagine and implement innovative and usable interfaces that will make tasks easy for your users while reinforcing your brand.
'User experience' can mean different things to different people. At RocketBoots we apply it in four ways:
Emotion plays a key part in our interaction with technology. Whether it's a media player listing our favourite music tracks or a cockpit display guiding an airliner down through the fog, we want interactions that work the way we think and make us feel good (or in the case of the pilot, extremely confident about their position).
Here is a simple demonstration of some three dimensional and bitmap manipulation effects developed here in the lab from scratch, using the new capabilities of the Flash 10 Player. The demonstration includes one of the first full OS X style 'genie' effects developed in Flash, and our unique interactive 'ribbon' component that combines the Flash 3D and PixelBender APIs.
The important difference about what you see in this demonstration is that it's not a pre-cooked video or hand-built on the Flash timeline - all of these effects are dynamically generated in the Flash player from their original sources. This allows images and other variables to be updated in a configuration file without requiring the application to be re-compiled, potentially a boon in a fast moving advertising campaign, or perhaps a collaboration application involving live video.
Product configuration can be challenging to do well on the Internet. Customers need to see the choices they're making reflected immediately in some sort of preview to give them the confidence to spend more time playing with alternatives, and businesses want to maximise conversion rates by making a clear path through to the checkout.
Flash is a natural fit for these requirements, and at RocketBoots we have implemented several customisers for our clients. We have been experimenting with the capabilities of Flash Player 10 to see how it might improve the configurator experience. Here is another prototype, making use of our genie effect and a “conveyor belt” metaphor to suggest a progression through the configuration process.
Over the last few years cameras have moved from being an optional extra to standard equipment on Internet connected devices. Increased processing power on these same devices is creating possibilities for new kinds of interaction with Internet users.
Using advanced computer science and mathematics applications can begin seeing through the camera: recognising objects and using this information to interpret input from users, or building a model of the environment in front of the camera and projecting virtual objects into the camera's field of view.
One of the fundamental problems in computer vision is recognising the boundaries of shapes in an image: for instance where does the background stop and a person's face start, or what is the outline of the next character on a sheet of paper? It's even more useful if we can detect straight edges, because they turn up in most applications and are easier to express mathematically in further processing.
Our eventual aim in developing fundamental tools like edge detection is to be able to create more natural augmented reality applications that do not require markers or special props to work.
Motion detection is another fundamental problem in computer vision. In this experiment we have implemented a motion tracker that can track multiple centres of motion at the same time.
Our next step is to build some gesture recognition logic.
Although it has been available in desktop and multimedia platforms for most of this decade, augmented reality has only come to broad attention in the last year or so with the implementation of some excellent toolkits for the Flash player platform. Like a “Smart Mirror”, augmented reality applications let the user manipulate a three dimensional model by manipulating a prepared physical prop which the application can recognise using the computer's camera.
Almost all of the Augmented reality demonstrations in Flash use the excellent FLARToolkit
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