Flash Video Interface: Analysis of the features

Flash video players are a big part of the web environment, and even with the coming upgrades from html5, most websites still rely on the Flash interface to stream video content to users. I thought it was interesting on an aesthetic and design level. So I decided to focus my attention on researching several Flash video players and examining the interfaces for each player. This was an ICS 419 design project. What's surprising is the complete lack of literature and studies for interface designs. I found that most sites had instruction guides that showed people how to install and create your Flash video players, but they didn't really talk about the design aspect of the interface. Most of them just used a premade layout from Adobe.

After looking at several interfaces from well known sites and some not so well known ones, I gave my analysis on what I thought. This analysis was based on design principles from Donald A. Normans books about the same topic, Emotional Design and The Design of Everyday Things. Norman gave general ideas about design in general, whereas I applied them to Flash video player interfaces.

Donald A. Norman was at one time the Vice President of Apple Computer's Advanced
Technology Group. His writings taught me a lot about design, but also about the world we live in.

Here is my paper: here

Week 17: Finishing the video

It's coming down to the final week on the Kukui Cup Energy Dorm Competition project. I've worked on the competition design group and the content development group in the past few weeks. As our group has filmed several interviews, we've been thinking about how to put together the video about Solar Energy. This past week we recorded even more material for our narrative in the video. It's getting even more in-depth now.

It wasn't very easy to create the narrative in the video and piecing together what we would say.

The footage we recorded this past week was of ourselves narrating the story about Solar Energy. What was most frustrating was the narration. We had to really think about the transitions that would lead into the interviews. There was a lot of takes in order to get the words correct.

Since we finished filming, it now comes down to editing and making the video good.

Although this past semester has had very little for me to do in terms of coding, I've learned a lot project management and the process of creating content.

Week 16: Slow progress

Our project in content development about solar panels is coming along. We shot footage last week.

This week hasn't been our most productive time. I had some projects coming up for other classes and needed to spend time on those things. What I've done is look at how exactly we would frame our footage in order to create a piece about solar panels. It seems more and more likely that we'll need to create even more footage in order to make a coherent video. We shot A LOT of footage last week by interviewing owners of solar panels and also on campus, but it needs some context to be valuable to us.

I was wrote a short script in order to get an idea of how this video will look. It really doesn't have much on it because we've only thought about the footage so far. The challenge has been in trying to make use of our material. We're not sure yet how to break it up and use the interviews we got.

An idea I had was to use slides or pictures in the video along with narration to explain how solar technology works. We'll use abstract pictures that describe the electrons that are being displaced by solar rays and show the flow of electricity as a result. I find that simple is usually better. This might be worth trying.

Script

We've already agreed that there would be at least two videos. Our second video will probably contain footage on the interviews we had with the Sunetric open house. That interview had even more material and we're just trying to look through all of it.