Hi there, I'm all new at this forum and have never posted here yet. But from the mail I' receiving, this seems like a very nice interaction design forum.
Now, I'm a interaction design student at the IT-University in Copenhagen ( www.itu.dk), Denmark. This summer I'm in San Francisco doing interaction design internship at Vuze (www.vuze.com) while also studying at Berkeley (Entrepreneurial courses). Chasing to the point (I could talk about the Bay Area and my experiences here for days...) I'm sat to redesign the "search-function" for the Vuze client (both the search field and the displaying of the results). Doing that, there seems to be a couple of factors that needs to be taken into consideration: - Vuze is a Torrent Client and have most tech savvy users (male 18-44 is 85%). - Obviously we want to reach a broader audience like Hulu (online service only available in the US) while still keep our existing audience. - We also have a online service where we offer users to download the client and there is also quite some content on the online service. Now here is my initial thought and ideas: - The Bit Torrent "problem": In my mind there are an immediate problem: when downloading Torrent files, the users are skeptical by nature. The reason for this, in my mind, is twofold: what illegal/legal content, and danger for virus or scam files. - The Bit Torrent search situation: A second problem is that as most users seem to be somewhat "techies" (at least Vuze users), they are used to receiving, and expecting, a different set of information (file name, file size, sender, etc) than "normal users" do. Therefore it is not sure that the visual way of displaying search results Hulu do are the right solution for us here at Vuze. - My idea: To reach out to "the masses" there must be a change in perception of what Torrent is. Only by changing the understanding of Torrents and sharing of files we can reach out to a broader audience. (Yes, here I'm aware of the copyright problem, but let's just say that the files shared and watched on Vuze is legal). My idea is to change the perception of Vuze from a Bit Torrent client to "The new Media Experience". In this way we will be able to go for the "bigger masses", and this will make it easier to make the design right. - If anyone have some ideas or comments for how to make the search better in general - I'm all up for comments! (Of cource there will be user tests in the near future). Are there anyone who have worked on this before? Or anyone have any comments? -- Dan Robert Ekrem 555 West Middlefield Road, Apt. A-109 94043 Mountain View, CA- California +1 (415) 519 7719 dan.ekrem [at] gmail [dot] com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
