The brainstorming and concepts phase of the service we designed were done thinking about the need of the users we hypothesized.
Talking about secret conversations, a dictatorial regime and a secret sect with the aim to restore freedom in Venice, we discovered that the topic of the user’s speech was the most important thing for the service we were going to design.
So we considered what we could let the users know about the presence of other conversations in the city, where they were and what other users were talking about. But also, how to put this information on the small screen like a mobile device’s screen.
We decided to give much importance to the user’s speech, so we decided to work with typography on the screen. Also we thought to use a metaphor to show the conversation and to work with it. This should imply how the service should be used, making it easy for users to understand it in terms already understood.
The metaphor we used is the soap bubble. We compare the conversations of the adepts to soap bubbles that grow.
The bubble refers to us to the image of a delicate placenta able to create internally an ambience in which thoughts can grow. This thin and delicate membrane breaks when it comes into contact with anything alien to it, as the adept’s discussions break off when a threat is nearby.
- when a bubble appears: a new conversation between people starts.
- when a bubble growns: the conversation become larger whan a new user are joins it.
- when a bubble disappears: the conversation ends.
The bubbles consist of words. These words construct the whole phrase that the speech recognizer analyses in order to send that specific tag, to let other users know about the topic of that conversation.
But … what is the speech recognizer? And a tag?
Let’s explain it better with the interactive application’s steps below.