Our next project was to create a video prototype of one of a selection of transportation apps. I chose to work with the One Bus Away app, as it was one I had a large amount of experience with and was familiar with a variety of use cases for it.
For the unfamiliar, One Bus Away is an app that lets users see how long it will be before a bus shows up to a stop, taking delays and early arrivals into account. It also allows users to look up bus routes and mark favorite stops and routes, but the scheduling aspect of the app is its main draw.
After some brief brainstorming I decided that the use case I wanted to show was somebody trying to plan a night out, who would use the app to determine what he had time to do before leaving his place. I chose this because it was a scenario where the app was making an active difference in the way the user behaved, versus the many other use cases where the app plays a more passive role in the user’s life.
From here I decided to take a more atypical route in the planning stages of the video. Instead of sitting down and drawing a storyboard, I instead turned on the camera and began ad-libbing in the general direction I wanted to go. As I came across lines or variations that I liked I would write it down in a script, eventually having a full script that ran about a minute long. I shot and edited the video over the course of a night, then recorded a voice over the next morning to replace the audio from my cell phone.
Here is my final video:
In the end, I’m fairly happy with the way it turned out, especially for having next to no video editing experience. I was a bit disappointed with the lighting I had available since it could be difficult to see the iPod’s screen. Also, a side-effect of filming late at night was that it was difficult to find stops that had busses coming through in a time frame that made my scenario believable. Despite these setbacks, I’m very happy with the way the video turned out.
Thank you for reading!