Interaction Design, Project Two, Blog Ten

I have now finished creating my application in Flash, however in doing this I had to change some of my ideas in order to make it work.

The main problem I had was with the embedded timeline feature in Flash. I could not find out how to have one button on one timeline which when clicked would activate something on another. In trying to work around this I ended up having a very complex and messy layout which I struggled to navigate through. Therefore I decided to try keep most things on one timeline which meant having multiple copies of Arrown for each animation. In doing this however I now don't have Arrown transform into the search bar etc and instead he flies off and then back on as the search bar and so on. Even though this goes away from what I originally wanted, I feel that this creates a better flow for the app and suits the motion of Arrown the arrow.

One thing I found useful along the way when scripting was the code snippets tool, this made things very simple which was helpful.

In terms of Arrown's voice, I decided to do an almost Cockney accent and have him as a somewhat nervy character who can also be quite condescending. He's a bit of an unlikely hero.

Another thing I have looked at is colour. Overall the main idea was to go with green, as it symbolises 'go' and then he turns red when the user should turn around as it symbolises 'stop' or 'wrong way'. I then believed both green and orange and red and orange go well together, orange is also the third colour in the traffic light so it seems to fit quite nicely. However some people have disliked the colour scheme so I have tried to alter it. I have looked at having a darker shade of green but it does not look right, I also tried changing the orange to yellow but this was not successful either. I think one of the main problems is that when using the app on a laptop screen it makes the plain white gradient background too overpowering. I think that when the app is on a phone it will look better.

For the interim I added a shadow to Arrown but since then I have removed it. Firstly because technically it would be hard to add in when animating and with all the different symbol layers, and secondly, for my 'trial version' app the user moves the phone horizontally so the arrow is flat anyway so there is no need for shadow. The whole idea behind the shadow was to make it clearer where the 2D arrow was pointing in 3D space, but I think it is fairly clear now without it.

Now I just need to take my 5 screen shots.