Latest on twitter:

September 16 2008

Wee! Jerry lifted the lid on this one a few days ago, but now it’s official… Jasmax, live!! Very proud of this one. It was a real Fracture team effort, and for a really really COOL client. It was awesome fun cracking into Papervision and getting a decent sized 3D project under our belts too. As with any new techy advancement, 3D is getting pretty thrashed in the Flash world of late as every man and his dog (including us, and our dog) hoe in to test out the possibilities. The brief from Jasmax was to show their creative side, the innovation, but not alienate people. That’s it, right there - the Holy Grail of Flash design, the thing you’re trying to do with every site you create: “Do something new” vs “Don’t piss people off”. People want to be impressed, but if you buzz them out too much you’ll lose them, and then you’re fucked, ‘cause your site is a dud. Putting it mildly, striking that balance is pretty tricky! So, I was very conscious to not get carried away and crack out a big self-indulgent Flash wank. We put a huge amount of thought and discussion into how to keep the site usable. The main answer we came up with was to provide 3 different ways to navigate the site, each accomodating a certain type of user: People who knew what they wanted would just use the Search, and just straight in, super fast.The older crowd and less adventurous folks would use the traditional text nav.And then there’s the people that would be willing to try it out, spend some time and immerse themselves. Whichever way you chose, you were still drawn into the spatial thing to choose pieces of work. That was our way of gently pushing people to be a little more adventurous, as we found that when people got the hang of hooning around in 3D, the response was extremely positive and satisfying. Same reason why we always returned people to the 3D between pages. I really like the sensation of using depth to move “in and out” of the pieces of work, and it doesn’t feel inconvenient. So yeah, I’m stoked with the site, and particularly the fact that we pushed a little innovation in there and it looks like it worked. It’s the hardest part about what we do I think - these measured experiments in human behaviour that you agonise over, trying to guess what any number of potential users from almost any demographic will do with what you’ve come up with. It’s also the most exciting part! Looking for as much feedback as possible on this one, good or bad. nick at fracture.co.nz, get at me!

Wee! Jerry lifted the lid on this one a few days ago, but now it’s official… Jasmax, live!! Very proud of this one. It was a real Fracture team effort, and for a really really COOL client.

It was awesome fun cracking into Papervision and getting a decent sized 3D project under our belts too. As with any new techy advancement, 3D is getting pretty thrashed in the Flash world of late as every man and his dog (including us, and our dog) hoe in to test out the possibilities.

The brief from Jasmax was to show their creative side, the innovation, but not alienate people. That’s it, right there - the Holy Grail of Flash design, the thing you’re trying to do with every site you create: “Do something new” vs “Don’t piss people off”. People want to be impressed, but if you buzz them out too much you’ll lose them, and then you’re fucked, ‘cause your site is a dud. Putting it mildly, striking that balance is pretty tricky!

So, I was very conscious to not get carried away and crack out a big self-indulgent Flash wank. We put a huge amount of thought and discussion into how to keep the site usable. The main answer we came up with was to provide 3 different ways to navigate the site, each accomodating a certain type of user:

People who knew what they wanted would just use the Search, and just straight in, super fast.
The older crowd and less adventurous folks would use the traditional text nav.
And then there’s the people that would be willing to try it out, spend some time and immerse themselves.

Whichever way you chose, you were still drawn into the spatial thing to choose pieces of work. That was our way of gently pushing people to be a little more adventurous, as we found that when people got the hang of hooning around in 3D, the response was extremely positive and satisfying.

Same reason why we always returned people to the 3D between pages. I really like the sensation of using depth to move “in and out” of the pieces of work, and it doesn’t feel inconvenient.

So yeah, I’m stoked with the site, and particularly the fact that we pushed a little innovation in there and it looks like it worked. It’s the hardest part about what we do I think - these measured experiments in human behaviour that you agonise over, trying to guess what any number of potential users from almost any demographic will do with what you’ve come up with. It’s also the most exciting part!

Looking for as much feedback as possible on this one, good or bad. nick at fracture.co.nz, get at me!