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User Cases

User who “plays” around with animation (mainly Flash) and heard about Anival.

Jack has toyed around informally with Flash for a few years now and can make some simple animations. He doesn’t know much about programming. He visits the site and sees that there are some neat prizes. His first question is whether or not he is good enough to participate. Is this a competition for professionals? He wouldn’t want to give it a shot if it all the other contestants are hotshots. [key concept: we want to give the impression that anyone can participate (and have a chance)] [ key concept: we are supporting animation of all formats, including non “movie” ones like Flash]

In order to gauge his chances of success he decides to browse through some example animations as well as some of the previous years entries. [How does he browse? Hotlinks to some particular ones? To a general repository? How are they organized? By title? Category? Format? Size? Rating? How many animations can we assume he sees before deciding to leave the site? How long will it take him to see them?]

Animator who has a partially complete animation and wants feedback from peers including ideas and suggestions for storyline, methods, graphical elements, and constructive criticism of animation as a whole: Jane has been working on her animation for Event #2 for several days. With the deadline approaching, she is stumped as to how to end the story. She goes to the site with the intention of soliciting some assistance from other animators. She isn’t part of a group yet, so she goes to the open forum and adds her incomplete animation to her page on the site. Then she sends a message to the entire user group to see if anyone can help her with some ideas. (Alternate: she posts her animation to her page and submits to a sub-group, perhaps people who have previously associated themselves with a particular area such as plot composition, graphic creation, method creation, etc., or people who have simply indicated they are willing to help others).

a. What motivates people to help? (This is, after all, a competition)
b. another alternate: Jane is a member of a studio, and she is working on a particular part of the animation. She wants her group to review it and give feedback before she passes it on to the next person for their part. She can post the incomplete animation to a private forum which only her studio can see, and all members can add comments to the page.


User who is new to Anival and wants to become involved. Wants to meet people with whom to collaborate and wants to understand the culture of the festival (“Is it cool? Should I do it? Are people friendly to me?”): Heather has heard about Anival and thinks she might like to participate. But she has some questions. What kind of contest is it? What are the other people like who are already contributing? Does she have the skills needed to compete? She goes to the site and reads about the contest. She learns that the software she needs is Alice, and finds out how to get it. Now she wants to read some of the chats between collaborators, and find out how difficult Alice is to learn and use. She goes to the Forums section and sees there are several different discussion boards. One has tips and tricks about Alice posted by the site creators, as well as a list where users can ask and answer technical questions about the software. She also sees a list where users are collaborating on ideas, teaming up into groups to compete together, etc. Finally, she goes to visit some user pages and sees profiles of competitors as well as some of their animations.


User who wants to recruit a collaborator: Simon is working on his animation alone, but he notices that others are working together and starts to wonder if maybe he should do this. He signs on to the site and goes to the Forums section. He navigates to the area where he can see a list of all registered users who have indicated they are willing to collaborate (Alternate: he posts a message asking who is interested in collaborating, or another alternate: he can scan the list of all registered members (where there are links to individual pages) and see all those who have a “collaborator” icon next to their name, meaning they are already collaborating or are willing to collaborate). He clicks on Jane’s name, and sees a list of her skills. She is good at creating graphics. Simon decides this is not a skill he needs, so he clicks on Heather’s name. She is good at creating custom methods. This is something Simon needs, so he posts a message to her asking if she’d like to work together on the next event.

Questions/Thoughts: