As we got our demo working our next phase is to move onto actually making it do something. So after some sessions with Chris and Karlyn, Petra and I went away and attempted to come up with something useful which would describe some of the processes and screens in a meaningful way. After some furious white-boarding, scribbling, crossing out, revising and chatting we managed to get a fairly workable model and a clear set of tasks/functions.
I used balsamiq mockups to create some fairly loose demo screens, which is a great prototyping tool as it has iphone templates making it easy to frame everything in a mobile context.
Here are some of the results. Describing the starting points and what happens when the user goes back in time
After talking about some of these things we started to discuss how to represent time as a navigation item in the system. Petra and I had originally proposed the size of the marker being how far back or forward in time the object is located. Allowing the user to shift between maps and map sets without having to fully understand the datasets available to them. Karlyn and Chris expanded on this by looking at it a different way and using the title of the landmark as a kind of visual “Tag Cloud”, and perhaps using the number of comments a landmark gets to influence the size of the text – removing the time element but creating an interesting social/folksonmy element. This style also lends itself to using tagging etc to create different perspectives on the data.