Description:

CipherCities.com is a place to play, build and share location based adventures on your mobile.

Skills Employed:

HTML, PHP, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Wordpress, phpBB

Roles:

Interaction Design & Usability
I started working on CipherCities as a research student. My MA was about how current trends in community content creation could be applied to the creation of location specific games. At the time CipherCities was an engine with a flash based front end. This interface allowed users to build games, but did not have any means to distribute them.

My job first involved identifying motivations for content creation and propagation. This was followed by the design of a series of interfaces that would facilitate the interactions. I also conducted several iterations of usability trials based on the interfaces.

I also created most of the graphics on the site with the exception of the current header graphic and the banner.

Web Development
Because we had a small team, once the first version of the site was set up, my role became more varied. In addition to being an interaction designer, constantly going through the site to find areas that could be improved, I also lent a hand in web development. In that role I worked with the system designer in laying out pages in PHP and CSS so that he could connect them to the database.

Asset Production
At some point during that time, I found myself producing showreels and instructional videos as well. These are all available on the site.

My role also involved the set up and design of the blog that would accompany the site.

SEO
Once the main body of the site was set up, I started to structure it for search engines as well, optimising pages in the site, and URLs in the forum as far as possible to allow search engines to properly index the site.