02/07

DevLog 4

//Website Design & Communication

After the last testing installment, which was very insightful, i had many many more ideas on how to improve the app and the process, but in the interest of time, i had to come to a close here regarding adding new features. All these further ideas, open ends and optimizations will have to live on in the Outlook/Future Possibilities section. 

The rest of the time will be spent on building the project website, including visuals for the project and optimizing the overall process by providing a guideline, making a memory form and instructions for general use. 

For the website, i came up with a very simple structure, which suits the type and amount of information i’m trying to convey. The frontpage opens with a fullscreen typo arrangement, made to grab attention and visual interest. The text reads “EVERYTHING DOES NOT SUCK, ACTUALLY” in Hangier, the same font as in the logo. The tonality of this statement is deliberately casual and colloquial, to lead with a fresh and carefree tone. On scrolling down, it reads: “ Sounds hard to believe? Introducing…” followed by the big logo of the project further down, with very short and concise text blocks outlining the most basic concept of Mnemo. Similarly short blurbs with animated images draw further down, explaining the steps involved in trying the app. In this way i’m taking the user quickly from “what is the problem” to “this is a tool for helping with this exact thing, this is how it works, this is how it would be like to try it right now”.

Prepared like this, users can then directly click on the big “Try now” button to start the process, or, if they’re interested in more background information they can scroll further to the “Want to know more first?” section and read a more detailed run-down of the science, ideas and principles behind Mnemo. At the bottom there is another link that leads to this paper, for the people who are even more interested in the background and the documentation of the project too. 

//Mnemo Main Process Pages

Behind “Try Now” is the Mnemo method itself. It begins with a short explainer and disclaimer to be careful and only use Mnemo with professional supervision, if known trauma might persist. Then follows a form for memory identification, what in previous testings was conducted by a person, is now made to be self guided, including instructions and inspirations for filling out. 

The questions are taken from the systemic therapy questioning technique [s], commonly used for associative therapy approaches. I made fillable text areas one can type into, and colour picker fields, where users can put one or more colours into that they associate with a memory. Both the form and the “Next Memory” buttons are dummy blockouts right now, the future step on this end would be to actually collect all 15 of the memories and serialize the data from the form to be able to save it and put it into the app in the next step. I deliberately left this out for now, since this is a purely technical hurdle, which is not integral for demonstrating how Mnemo works. 

This whole first part is more of a vision for the future, the next step with further time would be to test this more solo-user approach on people to see if it works, if people understand what to do and are motivated with pulling through. Like this, it is a pointer towards a possible way of looking a user interaction. 

As the second step, the users would delve into the VR app, either as a downloadable app, or even a Web VR application, depending on technical restrictions and potential time to be invested. Building for browser based VR would be much more challenging, since it is a newer, less documented technology that has much stricter optimization requirements. One would have to research and try out different ways of doing VR in browser, since Unity discontinued the support for their own WebXR platform some time ago, although some people still make it work. Also one would have to drastically reduce the quality of the models and textures to make it run fluidly. The payoff yould be a very seamless experience, going right into the app after the form. 

The last step is the recall/training page, where the users are instructed to train recall of the memory palace. The methodology of re-training is loosely oriented on the, asking for trying recall right after, and also three times within the next week, to make the palace stick. 

As a helping tool, and also fun to look at visualization, the users get a recall sheet, with their palace on it, and the objects and memories in order, as a reminder backup. It is generated with a screenshot and the data from the memories and connecions from the app. This is also a demonstration piece right now, in the future it would be generated from within the app and supplied as downloadable PDF.

In a last section, the users get a short overview of possibilities of when and how to use the established palace skill in real life, both as a situational and constant skill. 

That concludes the current vision-version of the entirety of the Mnemo method process. 

To stay within the format of the web-guided process, the thesis itself is also web-first on the Mnemo page to double as a text about the project and as supplmentary material for the project itself, for further insight for very interested users.

It doesn’t, does it?

Info section further down

Form

The first part: Memory identification