Problem Area

Loneliness caused by a lack of social support.

Research Problem

An analysis of how social media can be used to effectively build new friendships, strengthen old ones and combat loneliness.

Sub-problems

How can social media effectively build new friendships?
How can social media strengthen old friendships?
How can social media combat loneliness?

What Am I Going To Do?

Aid people who are battling loneliness by facilitating a way for them to make new friends and form a stronger social support network.

Why Am I Going to Do It?

People who are shy or timid have a difficult time going out into the world to meet new friends and as a result become lonely and tend to use media and social networks as a form of escapism from reality. Without social support networks such as school or work it can be incredibly difficult for this type of person to enrich their lives with new friendships and as a result become trapped up in loneliness and sometimes depression. There needs to be a fun and approachable way to connect people together for social gatherings.

Now that I have defined 10 Open Questions, which may or may not be answered by the time I complete my thesis, I have made an attempt at crowd sourcing my research by asking the first two questions on Quora. For the first question “What are the open problems in user experience?”, I have received two answers so far the first response stated that:

“An ‘open problem’ is a question without a known solution, and the interesting thing about user experience design is that we don’t have a lot of open problems or questions, it’s that we often have TOO MANY ANSWERS. ”

Unexpected perhaps due to the obviousness of the statement but yes it is true that there are as many answers to a problem that, we the designers, are able to come up with. The author of the comment goes on to cite pixel density, device design and button placement as recurring things which lack a standard solution. Reason being that there is really no standardized method towards approaching design, only best practices, which as the best of us know are meant to be broken because we’re intelligent enough to do so without having a negative impact on the product. Of course most all design firms that I’ve been at or read of have their own internal style guide with which they follow to make these difficult decisions. These internal style guides often match the philosophy and artistic style of the agency that developed it creating a holistic feel among their client projects. A potential thesis project to come from this would be to create a truly Universal style guide for all designers around the world, but I don’t particularly appreciate how arrogant a project like that would make me appear.

The second poster in my answer on Quora states that a problem with user experience is that it’s “constantly associated with design”, of course I don’t really understand the issue with the connection that the author of the comment holds with this matter; he goes on to state:

“But, you can’t design a user’s experience. At least, not in the common sense of the word. I don’t care how skilled you are at skeuomorphic button design, or how you can design a whole web-app without a single box-shadow or gradient. What’s the common phrase, ‘putting lipstick on a pig?’ ”

The author seems to be confusing visual design with the entire discipline of User Experience by constantly citing aesthetic elements which are entirely superficial and only add a small amount of delight to the user since most people would be perfectly happy with gray squares and boxes (pre Windows 98 software design) as long as the app works. Since you absolutely can design a user’s experience through proper research and testing this comment seems more to be taking issue with the overall confusion in regards to the terminology which is a valid concern in regards to this discipline.

In regards to the other question, “Is there an emerging area where there is a lack of UX?” I have received only one response so far but the content of the comment isn’t really notable enough to have a discussion about since it is outside the domain of my interests in regards to developing my MFA Thesis.

Flow Moments

As part of my mini-survey that I conducted on previously existing MFA thesis projects I came across an interesting topic, offline social networks. We have all of these great social networks for sharing photos, chatting with friends and reading news but very few in the realm of sites like Meetup, which encourage offline discussion and interaction. The SVA students project was called Recess which was specifically geared towards getting people to create social networks around the types of sports they liked playing using the app as a platform. This idea really got me thinking because there have been a lot of times in my life where I’ve wanted to go see or do things such as go to concerts or movies but didn’t have anyone to go with and often times I ended up doing these things alone, which really sucks. What if there was an offline social network which bridged the gap between the digital and physical realities that we live in and somehow allowed people to spontaneously connect?

Goals and Intentions

In the two quarters that I have been at SCAD my area of focus has been on User Experience within mobile applications, in Studio I, I designed and created a high fidelity prototype of a journaling app for the iPhone which offered compelling quest-like challenges to motivate people to write. Then in Human Centered Interactive Design I worked on a group project which involved defining a project proposal, conducting user research, testing and building a live prototype. Our project was to design an Interactive Kiosk for the Elements Mall in Hong Kong, a high end shopping mall with a low end directory; in a city as technologically advanced as Hong Kong we thought it was a bit out of touch for a mall with an image such as Elements to have a static kiosk.

During these two quarters I also developed my own artists statement or philosophy in regards to UX design in apps, it reads:

Meaningful UX is achieved when form communicates function within an experiential context; facilitating the users curiosity to experience an app in a meaningful way by either extending their natural abilities or emulating a physical process by placing them in a magic circle, and creating a suspension of disbelief that they are using an app.

All of this prior work that I have done and my own personal philosophy come together to remind me that my original interest when I entered graduate school was to explore the world of UX in apps, so it follows that this is where I must go in the direction of my project. Referring back to the list of published thesis work I discussed in the first paragraph lets take a look at what others have done.

Trouble in Libreland is a 2D real-time strategy game that will be written in C++ using Gorgon Game Engine. The project is initiated in order to compete in Liberated Pixel Cup. The game will take a place in a town called Libreland which is being attacked by wildlings. The aim of the game is to protect the town from wildlings by training soldiers and artisans; upgrading them with the taxes paid by citizens.

Getting Visual Studio 2010 (VS) to properly compile a game from source is probably the biggest challenge I have had in this class to date. After wrestling with the compiler for several hours I was finally able to succeed in getting the application to build and run within VS and that was a very rewarding experience.  The game that I chose is titled Trouble in Libreland and is an RTS/RPG hybrid the game gives you a town of villages that you need to upgrade in order to stave off attacking enemies called “wildlings”. The game is written primarily in C++ (over 50%) and partially in C, so I was able to find a .sln or solution file in the trunk of the repository for the game source code.

Getting the Source

In order to retrieve the source from the Sourceforge SVN repository I downloaded a useful application called Tortoise SVN, which I highly recommend as it is easy to use. Tortoise runs straight from the shell so all you have to do to grab a repo is right click within an explorer window select SVN Checkout from the dropdown and enter the URL of the repository in my case that was: ‘svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/trinlibr/code/trunk’. The source will then download to a directory called /code which you can place anywhere you want, mine is in My Documents.

After downloading the source navigate to /Project and click on ‘Trouble in Libreland.sln’ this will open the solution project in Visual Studio. Under the solution dropdown there are three sub-trees; GGE, Gorgon and Trouble in Libreland. Now next to the green play arrow in the toolbar up top change ‘Debug’ to ‘Release’  and click the green arrow. When I did this the first time I got the following warnings in a popup window:

GGE Win32 is out of date

Gorgon Win32 is out of date

Trouble in Libreland Win32 is out of date

this is fixable by right-clicking on the appropriate sub-trees and rebuilding each of them. Lets start debugging for release again:

waiting…

Error:
fatal error LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt after installing VS2012 release preview
Ok this isn’t so obvious to fix and was actually the primary reason I couldn’t get past the debug for release in many other games, lets see what google brings up for this error:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10888391/link-fatal-error-lnk1123-failure-during-conversion-to-coff-file-invalid-or-c

In this stack overflow question the answer tells us that we need to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional SP1, this takes a while so make a grilled cheese, brew some tea and come back later. Ok it should work now, right? right!? Lets see, debug for release again:

Warning Openal32.dll is missing

Ok this is simply downloading a missing library which can be found here:

**Note: This is a direct download**
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

Alright one last debug annnnnnd, success! The game will now run successfully

Links:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/trinlibr/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10888391/link-fatal-error-lnk1123-failure-during-conversion-to-coff-file-invalid-or-c
http://www.microsoft.com/en-hk/download/confirmation.aspx?id=23691
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y549e41e.aspx

BlockD is a Bejeweled styled game. It utilizes an array to store the the different block types, one for each color, the background image and empty spaces. Something that I thought was interesting about how the sprites were instantiated is how they are being defined in a separate file called resource.h and are set-up an INT called  #define IDB_B1 130. These objects were then called by the LoadBitmap function and stored in an array. My alteration to the source code was a simple one where I made all of the blocks the same color by only calling IDB_B1 into all the slots of the array.

Meaningful UX is achieved when form communicates function within an experiential context; facilitating the users curiosity to experience an app in a meaningful way by either extending their natural abilities or emulating a physical process by placing them in a magic circle, and creating a suspension of disbelief that they are using an app.

The gray and white dot is a sonar activated point of interest.

Building upon my previous project I have added in some new game mechanics such as a Graphical User Interface for the health and oxygen bars (in respective order, top to bottom), an enemy that protects a fish which gives you health back and an environmental hazard in the form of coral. I also added in an ability to discover points of interest using Ecco’s sonar.

Discovering a point of interest using sonar displays an informative message.

Following the theme of my last C++ project I decided to make another RPG inspired command line tool based off of the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion character creator. The tool prompts you to select from a series of options to build a character of up to five classes, but of any race and birth sign. You can grab the source-code for this project here.