Review: Zeega as an interactive storytelling webapp

I have just finished using Zeega to mockup a project for an interactive learning environment for service design based around the Global Service Jam.

What follows are a list of feature additions / UX fixes for what is a very useful tool.

While reading them, it's important to understand the visual capability of the tool, the kinds of projects it allows one to create, an how that extends to shape both features and the consequences for the end user.

UX:

1. Split the media and the layer side bar into opposite sides of the screen OR allow one pane to be completely minimised whilst working with the other.

2. The link layer is in an odd place. Recommend either moving it to side bar (e.g.  where pop-up is or move all of those features to the small bar where 'link layer' is) (which then opens up space for no 1)

3. rename "Link" layer to add "Nav"

4. and in the sidebar option to "Link" layer, add the ability to use your own media as navigation -- currently, to do this, I'm making boxes different sizes several times. This will clean up the workflow.

5. Ability to set default font and font size and font colour for whole of project. It's really really irritating that every time I type something I have to re-adjust this.

6. Please be careful, in future, with your drop down menus. Keep them small. They can quickly get out of control. For particular horrificness see hsbc.co.uk


Features:


1.Top of the list and really important!
Default video to request to play in HD (from YouTube) or highest def available. Or allow adding of video from YouTube using an embed code. As video plays almost in full screen -- the platform is well designed as a visual medium-- this is very important.

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Stories are...

Possibly the best summary I've ever heard of the importance of story in the grand scheme of communication: begin the Emotive Web.

story as process

or, this is your brain on social media

Learning to read — textual literacy — alters the human brain. But going back to pre-literate society, we find that our capacity to relate to symbols is visceral.  In hyper connected digital culture, where we are constantly confronted with information overload, where curation is the latest mis-placed meme, what do we understand by the emergent need to design for the emotional brain? What’s it’s place in digital culture?

When we experience story and internalise it, we do so in a very visceral way, more so than even we are aware of.

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Bio-psych of storytelling

Updated on October 27, 2011 by annlytical

I'm making a list of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience studies of how we physiologically internalise story. I've not yet read these studies, I'm not sure I would understand them, but I have read books where the authors discuss them.

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de Simone and Tzonis (2011)

From an interview with webdoc.com co-creators Olivier de Simone and Stelio Tzonis, 29 September 2011, London.

Main points

Webdoc is built around content, or it’s content centric. Tzonis and de Simone put it in perspective: social media is built for people to come together around content, this is built for content that people can come together around.  Their best example is like a rich media virtual flyer that you can control of. Other people with similar flyers can post their flyers in response to yours on an ever expanding scroll face.

Media and interactive features:

• rich media expression through youtube, flickr, facebook and urls (example:hit URL, asks for a URL, using twitpic, it embeds not only the tweet, but the picture tweeted, works similarly for instagr.am)
• Apps for

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