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Interactive Video
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A user interacts with a computer monitor from about two feet away. Our product was viewed from an average of fifteen feet away, on a television monitor that offers only 525 lines of resolution and the interface was a standard television remote control. U S West introduced me to Usability Testing on a grand and serious scale. They had teams of PhD.s who would constantly point out what wouldn't work and put human subjects through torture tests with our layouts. These people are really fun to have lunch with. (Based on this experience, I later convinced Creative Director Hans Bjordahl at XOR Inc., to add Usability Testing to our process for our client WholeFoods.com in 1998. User Experience and Usability Testing are now cornerstones of the Customer Experience offerings at XOR.) |
Delta Force In the final days of IVE, the corporate powers sent in Andersen Consultants to suck our brains out, and U S West never really did recover from their delay to get an early start on the Web, although they tried. |
In late 1994 I wandered
upstairs into the mysterious Delta Force lab and found a bunch of geeks
huddled over their machines playing with something called the Web. Dr.
Ed Freeman and Tim Carlin were tasked with figuring out what the Next
Thing was going to be. They sure pegged it. They let me contribute comps
and rig demos. We did demos for the NFL, Jackson Browne, Billboard Magazine and others. Product Visionary Mark Ferguson presented a concept of selling CD's on the Web, but his presentation was cut short at the meeting in Keystone because "...the Web doesn't have video...forget it." |