Project [Brother's Murder]

Responsiblity in this project: Usability

Abstract

Brother's Murder was a project to create a short interactive movie which is played on mobile device, iPod Touch. It was proceeded by 1. analysing the original story and considering what the key point of it is, 2. conceptualizing the interactive movie, 3. testing the concept with users by conducting a paper prototyping test, 4. developing and 5. conducting a usability test using the actual product. The result showed some significant points that should be considered when one story is converted to an interactive movie.

Story analysis

The project began by deconstructing the story, "the Brother's murder", by Franz Kafka. This is a story about a murder with four main figures: Schmar, Pallas, Mr and Mrs Wese. All the incidents happen within a narrow space, and a short time. Our group agreeded on that the main structure of this text obviously appears to be multiple point of view, hence the key elements of the application would be utilizing the story's open-ending style which allows users to have different interpretation, as well as location based function to make use of the characteristic of iPod Touch. Based on these points, the project was moved on to the stage of conceptualization.

Conceptualization

The design objective was to provoke a variety of interpretations by providing variation of multiple point of view. Basically the movie allows users to choose a character, and it shows a scene from the chosen character's perspective. Users will repeate this process four times, however, the time axis is chosen randomly so that the order of the story is random. The reason why randomness was applied was to increase the possibility of different combination of video clips, to provoke user's curiosity, and to increase the level of challenge. After viewing the movie, users can communicate with other users around them depending on their current location, to discuss about what they just saw. This function was provided to increase pleasure by sharing their interpretations, and possibly, to create more different interpretations. The assumption was that users could encounter different interpretations by visiting different locations, and that randomness of this encounter could provoke curiosity again.

Paper Usability Test and development

Paper usability test was conducted to test our concept before the development process. It simulated the actual product using paper and narration. The result showed that it would be needed to add more instruction to convey the concept of the product, as it seemed to be difficult for users to understand what they can do with it and its purpose, while how they could use it was not so difficult. Considering these points, the interface was revised and the final specification was passed to the member who was in charge of development.

Final usability test

The development process was not easy as creating video content for iPod Touch was almost the first experience to the members. However, finally the product was completed and the final usability test was conducted. The test result indicated importance of the first paper prototyping test: how to design the test and how to interpret the result change how efficient further development will be. If main problem of the initial concept are not understood correctly, modification cannot really help to improve usability of the product. The result also indicated that interactivity should be kept as something which could enhance the key points of the original story. In the case of this project, the elements such as randomness or locative part were not neccessarily helpful to convey the key points of Kafka's text, therefore they appeared to be bottlenecks rather than attraction.