}
Client: Microsoft
A digital artifact from the classroom of the near future.,
We designed and built this integrated textbook, homework, and social networking product for the Microsoft Education Group in collaboration with designer Daniele Monte.
Converting a physical book into digital form created many opportunities to leverage our real-world physical intuition.
We created affordances to mimic the ways we leaf through a book with our hands — browsing, bookmarking, and flipping between pages — all with the goal of bringing the best elements of analog books into the digital world.’
Other considerations included a custom pagination algorithm to provide a bridge between print & digital, so that teachers could assign reading pages. And colorful bookmarks that stick out of the side of the book just like real ones.
Starting from a blank canvas we explored interaction designs, created wireframes, and refined the vision of the app.
We worked as an agile team, designing and building features in very short sprints. As design & development progressed, we delivered frequent demos of work in progress to our Microsoft client and incorporated feedback in subsequent iterations.
We converted raw textbook data provided by a textbook publisher into a format compatible with the target platform.
To create the illusion of a real book, we developed an interactive 3D model, with several added details for intuitive navigation. We bridged the print-oriented content to display-oriented 3D pages with arbitrary layout dimensions.
The app integrates plug-in content created by 3rd-party vendors, such as interactive 3D diagrams of natural phenomena. This was done to tap into a library of rich interactive educational content being developed by Microsoft and its partners.
In addition to the core textbook reading experience, this app bundles additional educational features:
Interactive homework sets including crossword puzzles, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank Q&A. A rotating library of textbooks, designed to update as students start new subjects. And an integrated messaging client to create a social network between students and teachers.
2 years before the iPad was released, this app predicted trends and interactions that would come to define the current age of user interfaces.
The app was very well-received. It gained notoriety after being widely demonstrated to large crowds inside Microsoft, and word of its innovative design spread throughout the company.