Case Study | College of Saint Benedict + Saint John's University
Application Style: Custom 2-Module "Tour"
Awards: Adobe Site of the Day, April 3, 2009
Lead Partner: CampusTours, Inc
Tour Link
Unique or Complicating Factors
- - In-between branding efforts.
- - Coordinate College campuses.
- - Two client constituencies.
Tour Features
Shared Map
At CSBSJU, there is a unified Institution, but two physically separate and distinct campuses, sorted by gender. Their mapping interface therefore needed to functionally imbued with unity, but demonstrate the locations of distinct structures. In order to plan for two campuses, we built to N campuses, with different mechanism behavior based on different thresholds (1, 2, 3+).
Client-Side Deeplinking
Our first Flash application to allow for the user to save a location deep within the user experience. While not visually exposed to the user through a control, the keys Control+Home will copy a link to the user’s clip-board. Before this tour, deeplinking functionality was available in our applications only by creation in the content management engine. CSBSJU immediately used this functionality to target specific deep content in their tour to accepted student audiences.
View on Map
Given the dual-map nature of CSBSJU and the ability to locate building content from any position in the tour (through cuepoints to Interactive Video), it was necessary to allow a given building/location to change the tour’s section and state to locate the position the structure, regardless of which map on which it was located. A user may minimize a building, or tangent to a building from a Topic, but always be able to plot it on the correct map.
Sibling Main Navigation
Of the many navigation structures we have developed for Immersive Rich Media Applications, many find the ability to have all main sections of an application displayed as equal in the eyes of the user, even though their functionality might be very different. Chapman University and Berklee College of Music have also used this style. Nova Southeaster University is soon to do the same. When applications are constructed this way, is it often helpful to use alternate colors, icons, or other characteristics to help even subconsciously demonstrate that not all siblings are equal (though we have no examples to demonstrate that fact).
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. CSBSJU features cuepoints which are not only present on a progress bar, but also in a list, which reveals its contents during play. Other applications may only provide a list (Bryant University) or only points on a progress bar (Suffolk University).
"AnyTour" Settings Capability
CSBSJU was the first application to implement a mode of tour composition where far more interface settings are exposed than ever before in a custom application. With over 1,000 individual settings for the shell application, as CSBSJU may change their branding efforts over time, they are able to practically perform facial reconstruction on their application. For most custom tours, we have implemented a more modest interface settings file which might describe merely 100’s of unique settings.
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.