Track my progress as I grow a moustache for the men’s health charity. Current votes are for a Zapatta style caterpillar under my nose. Here’s how it is progressing on day 3.
Growth after 3 days
Moustaches are the new face caterpillars?
Author Archives: Garry
High Stakes slots is launched
High Stakes on Facebook. Tweaking and improving
This loveliness comes from wire frames that look a bit like this
Wireframe of improvements to the payout screen
Analytics is not the answer
A CEO I know has finally come round to the idea that endlessly changing things and adding new features is not the way forward – Hazaar! He now thinks that analytics will provide all the answers. As the company hops from the frying pan of whimsical change into the hellish fire of stats I have been arguing for user testing to be thrown into the mix. This is an uphill struggle.
The CEO threw up the idea of analytics identifying the cancer that we can chop out. I suggested that, pushing the analogy further, if analytics was the x-ray that identified the cancer then user testing is equivalent of talking to the patient.
It will be interesting to see if this patient survives.
UX note: Display default review as 5 stars
Example of play.com displaying default review as 5 stars. Even products with no reviews look like they are great!
Most shopping or review sites set the review to 0 or hide the start rating until enough reviews have been made. By showing 5 stars and asking people to review they have given people, quickly scanning the page, the idea that this item is great. This seems underhand, but I bet it is effective.
Arduino board received
Just received my Arduino board and downloading the software. Really looking forward to playing with Adobe Flash and external devices. Triggering an electronic cat and motion sensors. I’ll post some pictures or video as it happens.
LED lights up
I’ve started working through the set-up and experiments in a great book “Getting started with Arduino” thoroughly recommend it. The programming language, at this early stage, is structured in a similar way to ActionScript for Flash which is very reassuring for me.
This video covers getting Flash and the Arduino board to talk to each other. I’ll let you know how easy it is to get up and running with an Arduino Uno board on a Mac OSX 10.6 and Adobe Flash CS5…
Read the dice to prove that you are human
I came across this variation in the way you can test if the person interacting with your software is flesh rather than machine.
The standard Captcha mechanism is those distorted letter you often see. The idea is have something that humans can easily read and computers find very difficult.
BTW The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is an acronym based on the word “capture” and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart… from Wikipedia.
Cursor images
Images of the pointer cursor and the pointing hand (Macintosh). They are png files ready to use. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to create these images, so here they are ready to grab in my handy dandy blog.
Creativity – peer reviews and how Pixar do it
Nice article that condenses Ed Catmull’s original. It sounds simple.
The company I’m working for is based on software development and is growing a games team. The interesting thing is that pairing of developers and an agile approach already exists. They seem reticent to create hierarchies and instead of appointing leads in the games team they want to keep a flat structure. I started researching how to carry out peer reviews for a creative team of games producers, designers and animators (the Flash developers should be included – but that’s another story).
I was taken back to when I set-up a company (Preloaded -digital media studio, 2000) my idea was that it should be a collective. With a small core of people 3-5 but drawing on much wider network of people with a variety of skills that we could draw on as and when projects required them. We started out this way, we hired desks in someone else’s offices – it was the only way we could pragmatically build the company. The collective network seemed to wither and fade as we became busier and fell into copying the same structure as everyone else.
It feels like a new opportunity for evaluating ways of working has been thrust upon me and I’m keen to see where we end-up.
Screaming of Paul at the Ritzy
This morning I look K baby to a special screening for ‘mothers and babies’ at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, SW London. It’s callled a screaming, you can guess why.
It was pretty busy, mostly white middle class couples with young babies. Anyway me and my girl K roll into the foyer, we check K’s ride into the buggy park and entered the cinema. K’s eyes sparkled a lovely big grin spread across her boat and she wiggled. It was dark, she pivoted round the stare and smile at the lights on the ceiling. Then the big screen, lots of others of K’s kind, the occasional grizzle, screech. K grinned and squealed for the first 30 minutes. Did some sitting and watching then grinched herself to sleep in my arms- lovely.
The film Paul was quite entertaining too, quite silly and funny at times.
Rattla becomes Hissteria
While working on new game formats by analysing real world games it struck me that a board game (e.g. Snakes and ladders) delivers player feed back on their progress towards a clear goal. It also shows their opponent’s position relative to their own.
Players can see where danger lies and where bonuses can be gained. The board format is familiar (possibly reassuring) to new players. Any rules can be more easily understood if the player has fewer new things to comprehend.
Simple games played against other people provide hours of fun and endless replays.
We have started production of the game originally named Rattla and now Hissteria.
Rattla 'ugly' prototype board with snake on the move