Case Study | The Art Institutes
Application Style: Custom 1-Module Adaptive "Tour"
Awards: Adobe Site of the Day, June 16, 2008
Lead Partner: CampusTours, Inc
Tour Link
Unique or Complicating Factors
- - Constantly changing branding, coincidental launch with new website.
- - Numerous internal constituent audiences (each member school).
- - Heavy truth-in-advertising content redaction process.
- - Mechanism replication to 34 member schools, each with unique and overlapping content.
- - Mechanism concept change mid-way through the project.
Tour Features
Interactive Video
Though it has become a mainstay of most of our applications since 2007, Interactive Video can be implemented many different ways. It is primarily the coordination of distinct moments within a piece of “timecoded” media where the user is presented with alternates courses of action which reveal more detailed views of content which was just referenced. Practically, these “cuepoints” relate to Topics, Buildings, People, and other windowed content within an application. In other tours, this content coordination takes the form of simultaneous map movement, image display, text display and other tricks. AI features cuepoints which are not only present on a progress bar, but also in a list, which highlights its contents during play, but allows that list to remain persistant in its complete form through the execution of the timecoded media. Other applications may only provide a list (Bryant University) or only points on a progress bar (Suffolk University).
Module Replication
All our tour applications allow for one or more “modules” which can be present as few or as many times as desired. A module is essentially a set of behaviors and styles. In AI, there was only one module created for their application, but at least initially it was replicated twice. One module held content that related to all schools, and the second told the story of one specific institution. Both modules allowed for a hierarchical presentation of content or a plain list of equals. In the end, each member school wanted their own story only told, and so the first of the two modules was removed without any changes to the mechanism.
ACME-Based Content Management
Though because of our decoupled construction, our applications may be content managed by many applications, we have found that few CMSes are able to manage data and information on as discrete a level as our own ACME. With the management of all types of media which Flash can support and a structure that encourages the archiving and not deletion of data, ACME can instruct a user about data architecture as well as simply manage content.