PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Using existing educational content from print products, produce animated, interactive, multimedia educational software products that both supplement current product offering and expand the product line into the digital space.
USER
Students with special needs, learning disabilities, and special education educators.
CHALLANGE
PCI Educational Publishing was known for it’s original, supplemental materials for special education and learning disabilities – specifically products that teach life skills. Using content from the most popular products, we needed to create an interactive, multimedia presentation of the material. The user needed to be able to go between the print material and the digital presentation, experiencing similar illustrations, characters, and activities, as their computer time could be limited.
SOLUTION
Design a series of modules that mirror the chaptered content from the exiting material, introducing the illustrations in an animated format and designing interactive games and activities for each module. The illustrations were mostly vector graphics, so using Adobe Flash was the logical choice at the time. This allowed us to repurpose existing and familiar content across most of the modules.
Lessons Learned
Circling back with the client. When working with a lot of structured educational content, we needed to make sure we presenting ideas to the authors in a well-organized, lesson-based fashion. At this time, these software modules would serve as a supplement to current lessons. Therefore, breaking them down into module chunks that both made sense to the overall lesson but also made the best use of the user’s computer time was critical. After several rounds of adjusting this scope per module, we were able to define what those chunks should be.
Previsualization saves time. A form of prototyping, we wireframed animated sequences for authors to comments on and approve. For animation, we had always done some form of previs for all animated sequences. As we went forward, we found the more we increased this phase, the shorter the production time of this content overall.
My Role
- Strategy and Brainstorming
- UX Producer
- Activity Designer
- Animation Designer
- Install/Delivery Production