Unrestricted Interaction

This week we had to write a theoretical blog post on what we would do with our Zulul Love Letter’s application if we had no coding restrictions, basically be creative and think of how interactive our application COULD be (without needing the knowledge to code it).

So I was thinking that there is no point in having the Zulu love letter if you don’t use it as a love letter. So I thought it would add a whole new level to the application if one could save their love letter, and then send a url to their loved one. The receiver would then click on the url and be taken straight to a page which would simply portray the created love letter and a note from the sender letting them know exactly what it was and what it meant. This would obviously mean that the app would have to be able to store and save the love letter. It could perhaps be set up to save it for a short period of time and then replace it with another’s love letter, basically the link would expire if the receiver of the love letter did not visit it within a specified time frame. This would mean that there would not need to be as much storage space needed for the indefinite storage of love letters, once the receiver has looked at the love letter, they have the option to save it their computer, otherwise it would get erased from the system. Another option for sending the love letter would be to send a picture of it to someone’s phone. Perhaps the user could chose between a BBM pin or whatsapp number to send the picture of their love letter to. This would save the receiver from having to get onto their computer to see it and would also be in keeping with the mobile site theme that we have been working on this term. Obviously this would meant that the image would have to be quite small so that it loads quickly on the phone and doesn’t use too much data but this could be achieved with smaller images that are optimized for web and mobile web to be specific.

One also needs to consider that in order to save the love letter the user/creator would need to create an account to save it to. I assume this would require php and databases which we did last semester. This could be a very simple username/password log in set up for readers of the magazine itself.

Other more basic interaction that I would like would be the ability to drag the beads onto the canvas and to move them around on the canvas and put them anywhere you want. Another fun option would be to bed able to change the sizes of the beads so that one could have different sized beads in their love letters. It would be nice to be able to change the colours of the beads simply by clicking on them when they’re already in the pattern of the love letter too, rather than having to delete the bead and then load another time everytime you wanted to change the colour. Perhaps the user would be able to click on the bead that needed to change colour, a pop up mean would appear and they could chose the new colour that they wanted the bead to be, and it would automatically change.

Another useful option would be to have templates already made that the user could take inspiration from and follow. Perhaps one could click on the template option and a much lighter-coloured template would pop up on the canvas and the user can follow the pattern but change the colours if they want. This would make making patterns a lot easier as the user would not have to count beads and plan so far ahead, they could simply follow the template. This would also be useful in protecting users from making love letters that said something they didn’t actually intend for it to say, as the combination of triangles and colours is quite complicated in the interpretation.

Perhaps another option would be to give the user the chance to type in the words that they would like to use in their love letter, for example love, joy, desire etc and then the application automatically generates a love letter for them from those emotions/words. It would be a quicker way to do it than to add each bead yourself, and could also potentially be more accurate in portraying accurate feelings and not just something that looks pretty.
These are all options that could be used in the Zulu Love Letters application, if we didn’t actually have to code them all in. Sometimes I wish we could just wiggle our noses and our applications and sites would look and do exactly how we imagined them in our heads! :) A girl can dream! ;)