Uniqlo is a clothing store chain from Japan that was promoting the opening of their store in San Francisco. To do this, Uniqlo created an online game featuring a youtube-famous fat cat named Maru. Maru is loved by both San Franciscans and Japanese, so they chose him as a sort of spokesman. San Franciscans could go online, click on a box and watch Maru jump in it. If you picked a winning box, you could receive a free Uniqlo jacket or even ride in the Uniqlo blimp.

The target audience for this is young, mostly females but also males in their teens or early 20’s. Basically a demographic interested in trendy clothing and also up on viral youtube videos.

The story they are telling is that they are a fun and current company, interested in reaching out to their new customers in a different way.

The emotion they are conveying is definitely more lighthearted and fun-loving. Also, a little quirky and accessible.

Using a cute cat, Maru, is a sure-fire way to connect emotionally to their younger youtube loving audience with this game. It shows they are interested in their customers and willing to thing outside the box (pun intended) to engage with their audience.

Interaction design is one of the reasons I chose to come to SCCA. It’s important to me that Seattle Central is so in tune with emerging technologies and what is valid in the real world now.

We have had many weekly assignments but our final project is a 5 week redesign of the Seattle Library iphone app.

The first day, we redesigned a Toshiba remote control which was fun to nerd out on — especially since I designed a couple audio remotes when I was doing graphic design for a speaker manufacturing company.

What the balls is the “Recall” button anyways?

Another assignment was a sitemap. Our instructor provided us with a bunch of terms that were pages on a website and we had to organize them in a way that made sense to us.

sitemap

Yet another assignment was to redesign the iTunes homepage. As our instructor would say iTunes has become “bloated” and is used for so many things other than music. The design has not seamlessly upgraded with the added functions.

Here is my iTunes redesign

Another assignment I enjoyed was taking a wireframe and designing a “look and feel” for it. It was a general “photo sharing” iPad app.

top is what was provided for us, the bottom was what I designed in Photoshop

At first I was a bit crabby pants about designing vector graphics in Photoshop since I was always taught they should be done in Illustrator, but the reality is a lot of people design in Photoshop. Also, I feel a lot more comfortable designing and editing within Photoshop.

In Jill’s design class, we have had one graded assignment. We had to use a 2″ x 2″ design we made and duplicate it many times to create different shapes. We had to create a stable piece and a dynamic piece. Then we had to take either one and use it to inspire us to make something inspired by Gestalt. You still with me?

stable // dynamic

Gestalt inspired by dynamic composition

I did enjoy the absence of the computer. This was all done with a good ole fashioned copy machine.

Here are some more Gestalt examples:

An easy way to put it is you are indicating something is there that is really not . . . if that makes sense.

In an effort catch up on the school year, I going to do a class by class run-through.

In Jason’s Production class, I’m pretty sure I learned more in one class than I have in 5 years.

Our first graded assignment was to take abstract terms and distill them down to the simplest possible solution. The pairs I chose were near/far, slow/fast, and organized/chaos.

near/far
slow/fast
organized/chaos

Our second assignment was a graphic translation of any object of our choosing.

Typewriter

I wanted to do something mechanical and intricate — I knew that it would be difficult, I just didn’t realize how difficult. The hardest part was knowing how much to simplify it. I’m happy with the final product despite how long it took.   

I watch Netflix often and absolutely hate the browsing “feature” on the homepage. It seems they are trying to recreate the video store atmosphere, and while I miss the video store for its browsing specifically, the Netflix experience is slow, clunky, and honestly hurts my eyes.

When you hover over the left or right arrows the images slowly scroll which is laborious. There seems to be no way to make them scroll quickly. Also, the choices they have will sometimes seem random. Many times, they will have the same movies in different categories which is not helpful.

This option should be available for all the genres

If you click “My List,” which is the first section on the Netflix homepage, it takes you to a list of everything on your Instant Queue. This is much faster to navigate; you can scroll up and down and see your complete list instead of slowly scrolling right or left. It would be very helpful if they had this available for all of the genres.

instantwatcher.com

Also, I tend to use a 3rd party website, instantwatcher.com which has all of the Netflix content listed and is specifically for browsing Netflix titles. There was a need for this website because the Netflix browsing experience is so bad.

Netflix doesn’t even have to design a new experience because someone else has already done it for them. Granted, they could polish the instantwatcher design, but having this list view as an option would be extremely helpful. Also, instantwatcher’s “New & Noteworthy” section is especially helpful. It is much better than Netflix’s “New Arrivals” because I have actually heard of the titles and they may be something I would like to watch. All of their genres are at the top, which are easy to find and clear to read. Netflix has so much content that it can be daunting. A better browsing experience would really help users take advantage of all of the amazing content they have.