Project Overview

The ITS group within U.C. Berkeley needed a desktop tool to assist their intructors. These instructors give lectures on proper traffic engineering techniques, and they needed something that was easy-to-use while providing clear and convincing visuals for the students. Futhermore, ITS needed the tool quickly (within a three-month period) and only had a limited budget.

WorkZoneViz: A Desktop Application for Lecturers

McQuillen Interactive worked with ITS to build the tool from the ground up: Starting with an initial brainstorming and requirements gathering session, we worked closely with the ITS team throughout the project to make sure what we built was appropriate and useful for the instructors.

We used short two-week development cycles (inspired by Agile Development) and frequent client reviews to incrementally build WorkZoneViz, avoiding scope and timeframe issues and getting functionality right.

A Screenshot from WorkZoneViz
This is an example of a finished "lesson." Instructors can load and save lessons, or modify them on-the-fly with the complete library provided on the left of the screen.
 

McQuillen Interactive is a small studio. But we had all the skills necessary to complete the WorkZoneViz project quickly and effectively, including

  • creating a clean, simple and powerful user interface
  • designing the structure of the application to be modular, stable and extensible, using the open source ARP Framework.
  • developing the ActionScript code
  • creating all "isometric" illustrations for each lesson
  • managing the project effectively to come in on-time and on-budget

A closeup of an exercise from WorkZoneViz
Since all artwork was done as vectors, close-ups of examples remain crisp and clear.












 

Technologies employed:

  • Flash 8.0, ActionScript 2.0
  • ARP Framework
  • Multidmedia's Zinc application
  • XML