creative-cognition

Case studies

Bespoke user-interface elements

In this section we present a number of specialised user-interface elements going beyond what might be expected 'out of the box' with current RIA development tools.

A specialised accordion

Not quite your usual accordion control. This technique was developed for a jeweller's web-site. It displays one full page at a time along with a visual cue to the content of the other pages. The user can reveal any page by simply moving the mouse over the page of interest. The author has the ability to set the portion of the image to use as visual cue in its minimised state.

Note: Client-confidentiality prevents use of the jewellery art-work so for the purpose of demonstration we present some photographs taken at the Living Museum exhibition in St James' Park commemorating the end of World War II, fifty years on, back on 8th July 2005 in St James' Park. (The day after four idiots suicide-bombed London.)

Unfortunately you don't have a current version of Flash installed, which you will need to view the effect described. You can install Flash from this link.

Implemented using Object Oriented ActionScript 2 in Flash 8.

Minimal local navigation

Unfortunately you don't have a current version of Flash installed, which you will need to view the effect described. You can install Flash from this link.

A site required visually very minimal and unobtrusive navigation controls. Their presence or otherwise is determined from back-end XML files. We achieved this by presenting the sub-menu as simple numbers. However, since the controls are so minimal and don't appear upon every page, they could easily be missed. So we needed to find a way of emphasising their arrival when appropriate. This was achieved by giving them an obvious animated entrance to the screen, and providing each with a 'tool-tip' style title which reveals on mouse-over.

Implemented using Object Oriented ActionScript 2 in Flash MX 2004.

Text build (html text)

Unfortunately you don't have a current version of Flash installed, which you will need to view the effect described. You can install Flash from this link.

On the same site we wished to build the project descriptions to the screen. To do this we decided to go for an animated cursor/typing simulation. If a user reads faster than we animate, a quick click on their part will cause an instant reveal.

It looks and sounds easier to create than it was. Considering the text content is html text, and as such includes various non-display characters, some reasonably complex code was written to correctly display the visible characters one at a time, each time correctly positioning the cursor. The code also had to work around various problems inherent within Flash MX2004's text rendering and metrics.

Implemented using Object Oriented ActionScript 2 in Flash MX2004.