Case Study | University of Miami
Application Style: Custom Fused-Module "Tour"
Awards: Adobe Site of the Day, September 1, 2009
Lead Partner: CampusTours, Inc
Tour Link
Unique or Complicating Factors
- - In-between branding efforts.
- - Vast array of schools
- - Small Team
Tour Features
Multi-Panel Navigation
With Miami's tour, the user can easily change his focus to more or less interest in the physical campus by re-portioning aspects of the interface to give deference to the interactive map.
Commentary
Though not connected back to People, Miami's tour does make use of more than 200 clips of commentary offered by students. Upon launch, these commentaries only applied to Thematic videos (left panel navigation), but the tour mechanism will allow Miami to expand their use of commentary to Buildings and Topics whenever they have the opportunity.
Client-Side Deeplinking
Our second Flash application to allow for the user to save a location deep within the user experience. Unlike other uses, Miami entertained a "Create Link" button which remains persistant throughout the user's experience and will copy a link to the user’s clip-board. Before this feature, deeplinking functionality was available in our applications only by creation in the content management engine.
View on Map
Given the ever-present nature of a map in Miami's tour, but also to have a map with so many sturcutres, a user might get a little turned around. With the View on Map feature, a user may minimize a building, or tangent to a building from a Topic, but always be able to have the tour show them where the structure lives on the map, in any position.
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. Maimi 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).
Coordinated Map Movement
A function of interactive video, Coordinated Video (here, Coordinated Map Movement) allows map data to be turned on and off, and the map and zoom to highly locations independantly of any Topic or Building cuepoints. This allows for a true "guided tour" experience if that is what is desired. It also allows for much tighter integration of a location and concepts it may pertain to as spoken in a Theme video.
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.