Deliverables:
- Interaction Design
- UI Specifications
- High fidelity prototype
- Usability studies
Team Composition:
- Market Development
- Development
- Visual Design
- Branding Group
- Sun Labs R&D
Project Buz
Involved: 2004 - 2005
Project Buz started in the Advanced Development group in Sun Microsystems. Project Buz provides a combination of peripheral awareness and communication management for user defined lists of contacts.
The aim of the project is to unify applications and tools at the client end, providing a more coherent picture of the virtual space a team may inhabit. This aggregate view is a compelling way to centralize communication channels for collaborative work -while it does not replace familiar applications like email and calendars and instant messaging, Project Buz brings all of them together and turns the user's focus from choosing the type of communication to choosing the person with whom they want to communicate.
I joined the Buz team after finishing the tools styleguide work mid 2004. The project was just starting and I took over as lead interaction designer as the team looked to take the rough prototype they had into a more refined state for testing and internal deployment.
My immediate goal was to redesign the interface and take the project another step toward becoming a product. To that end the work I did focused on developing a hi fidelity prototype in Flash. Flash proved to be an effective way to quickly enunciate and test interaction ideas and hone the interface to highlight the integration we wanted.
More information on Project Buz can be found at http://www.sun.com/software/desktop-collaboration/
An earlier Flash protoytpe I put together can be found here. This prototype represents early work exploring interaction ideas and visual metaphors for the orchestrated collaboration experience.
Masthead image derived from: Stairs In Memory © Severin Koller for openphoto.net CC:Attribution