War On Sesame Street

The Sesame Workshop has launched one of their very first smartphone and tablet apps: A resource kit enlists Elmo in helping kids and families cope with deployment, homecoming, injury, and loss.

Children in military families with loved ones serving abroad face many unique challenges. Deployment is stressful and homecoming requires readjustments. Contingency plans need to be made if a parent is injured, and the worry of a loved one passing away is always there.

Elmo might be able to help.

The Sesame Workshop, which has been actively serving military families for years, recently launched a Sesame Street for Military Families app designed for both children and adults; it is currently available in iOS, Kindle Fire, and Android formats.

The bilingual English- and Spanish-language app launched in late September and is part of a larger multimedia project that also includes DVDs, Internet programming, and an active community page with resources on Facebook. Users can select from five different subject areas: Deployment, homecoming, self-expression for children, injuries, and grief. Although the Sesame Street app contains many child-friendly materials, the app's layout is intended for viewing with a parent or caregiver.

Where there's Sesame Street, of course, there's Elmo. The Muppet icon shows up in numerous places in the app, performing songs and skits about his father going away for duty and his Uncle Jack passing away. Another Muppet, Rosita, shows up in segments about her father using her wheelchair after becoming injured.

Portions of the app discussing loved ones being injured or killed come with disclaimers and require "unlocking" every time they are clicked on. Parent and caregiver-oriented segments of the app offer advice on managing multiple military deployments, letting children vent their emotions, dealing with children while in physical rehabilitation, and managing the grieving process for children.

This app is the latest installment in a longstanding Sesame Workshop project to assist children with loved ones serving overseas. The clip above shows scenes from the Sesame Street for Military Families DVD, many of which were also used in the app. Advocacy groups for military families and disabled veterans assisted the Sesame Workshop in developing original content. Sesame Street characters are also hitting the road for family-oriented USO tours as well; the “Sesame Street/USO Experience” tour started in April 2012 and regularly visits domestic and foreign U.S. military bases.

One noteworthy aspect of Sesame Street for Military Families is that it's one of the first official Sesame Street apps; the only other Sesame Workshop-developed app currently on market is a financial literacy application launched in early in 2012.

In case readers were wondering, the Pentagon stands by its relationship with Sesame Street and does not want to ruffle any feathers in the Mitt Romney-Big Bird scuffle.

[Images: Sesame Workshop]

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

How To: Adding Depth to User Experience (UX) with Generalists and Hybrids

In Part 1 of this "UX How To" article I explained the families of roles within the user experience discipline; UX Specialists, UX Generalists and Hybrids. The Specialists, from research, strategy, design and front-end development, were covered in detail. Generalists and Hybrids float above and in-between. If UX is a discipline of science and art, Generalists are those who harness the talent within a business context. Hybrids are those who create possibility by successfully merging two thought patterns into one.

Floating Above - UX Generalists

Many of my close colleagues (with whom I studied and practiced) have dramatically influenced me as we navigated together into a view of humanizing business. I would hope that the influence was mutual in this journey towards the business strategy and model of applying the humanities to enterprises..

UX Generalists are typically referred to as producers or directors and their duties, like their titles, vary widely from shop to shop. Project managers sometimes take the place of the generalist, but can quickly lose their footing if a project veers outside of interactive design and development. Very few project managers understand the nuances of the UX roles and how the activities performed and deliverables created by each role weave together to ultimately deliver a high-quality, business-grounded experience.

The best generalists are like conductors of the symphony. This unique ability is highlighted both in Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind and in the 10 Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley. One of the most overlooked capabilities of generalists is that their ability to abstract does not end at the boundary of their discipline. The very same skill that helps them weave different UX roles, activities and deliverables also helps to make projects profitable and beneficial for both the client and the team alike.

The Inbetweeners - Hybrids

A close colleagues once said to me that he did not want his UX architects doing development work for solutions. Even if they had the skills to do so, he did not want to start a process where their design work would be biased by what was easier to implement rather than what was the most efficacious for the intended users. I understood his concern then, and I still do today, but I have a different perspective. While it is true that some practitioners can be tainted by what they know of the possible, it is also true that they can be uplifted and inspired by it as well.

Students of popular music already know a basic fact: genius emerges from practitioners who figure out a way to fuse multiple genres together. A beautiful illustration of this, pictured below, was created by Reebee Garofalo and is included in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. The Computational Media program at Georgia Tech is one of a new breed of university programs where students who want to fuse art and technology together can get  their creative-geek on. Daniel Chase Hooper, a recent graduate of the program, has shown the promise of the Hybrid that I am referring to.

Using skills from several disciplines including (interaction designer, software engineer, marketing and video production), Daniel created a completely new way to edit text on the iPad and then posted a clever video on YouTube that ultimately helped him land a post-graduation job working as a developer at Apple.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com