10,000 Monkeys - Harnessing the Power of Typing Monkeys

PhizzPop Design Challenge Chicago Wrap-up

In possibly what was one of the biggest surprises of my career, I was part of the team that won the Chicago PhizzPop Design Challenge. Normally I'm rather confident that I'm the greatest developer ever in the heavyweight division, but I was pretty down on our chances the day of the competition. In 48 hrs I had gone from "We are going to dominate this problem" to "This is the worst f*cking application ever designed by anyone, anywhere".

A week later, I can still hardly believe Carlos Segura, one of the judges and a ridiculously talented designer said "Clarity is the clear winner". I thought he was going to say "I can't believe you had the audacity to put this $hit in front of me"

So what is the PhizzPop Design Challenge?  It's described as "The PhizzPop Design Challenge pits top interactive, Web, and design agencies against one another to push the limits of technology and creativity in a battle royale. Think Mad Max for design."  Basically we had 2.5 days to build an application that best demonstrated an innovative design to solve a problem. The problem statement for Chicago can be viewed here.

Powered by several cases of Red Bull and a new coffee machine, I was ready to dominate.  Larry Clarkin mentioned we had sleeping bags.  Actually it was Aero beds.  We roll high class in our office.  Although we didn't really sleep for the 2.5 days.  Once you drink your body weight in Red Bull you can pretty much work 72 hrs straight.  Granted I did start to hallucinate around the 48hr mark - I swear the monkeys were trying copy my designs.

So what did we want to build / demo?

After our initial brainstorming which we had about 100 ideas we wanted to build and we grouped them down to two areas.  The in-flight entertainment experience and the reservation / ticketing process. The main themes that we tried to infuse in both parts were connected, interactive and personalized.

Basically we saw the current flying experience as very impersonal.  To most airlines you are probably just a frequent flyer number at best.  With the exception of Southwest, most airlines know exactly who is in what seat so why not customize the entertainment experience for that seat to a specific person.  Starting with a simple "Welcome Kevin Marshall" to having a selection of movies and reading materials that are selected based on my preferences.  We also wanted it to be interactive.  Like allowing you to actually interact with the map showing the planes current location and zoom in on specific part.  Finally it should be connected to services that you currently use like Netflix for movies, Amazon to get reading material or having knowledge about hotel / car reservations that are related to your flight.

Some ideas that we dropped off due to time constraints were:

• New rewards program similar to XBOX Live achievements. The idea was that rather than just miles you'd get points based on distance flown plus other achievements like flying to all 7 continents or South American Tour (fly to 3 countries in South America) or Old World Tour (Fly to the UK, France, Spain, Germany).  Plus you'd have a nifty badge so you can add another piece of flair to your blog.  I really wanted to do this but we had to cut some things and it didn't seem like it would demo well or really hit any of the profiles.
• Kinko's In-flight office.  Like I mentioned earlier, we wanted to tie the in-flight experience into other services that passengers are already using.  The idea was that you could print stuff and it would be waiting for you to pick up when you landed.  Or some in-flight fax machine for the people who still actually send faxes.  Although it's funny that one of the judges said he was looking for someone to build exactly that.  Sucks that I was the one out of the group that decided to cut that feature.
• Upload Photos to Flickr/Facebook/Windows Live by plugging you camera into the USB port in the seat.  We wanted to have a simple way to upload photos without having to try to set up your laptop / camera in the .5 cubic feet of passenger space in modern planes.  I'd love if this actually existed since uploading photos is one of those things I always want to do when I get home after a trip, but it somehow keeps falling down the ToDo list.
• In-Flight chat.  A lot of the other teams had this feature so I'm kind of glad we didn't build that.  The only thing that we wanted to do that might have been slightly different is to integrate with Facebook and our game system.  Like you could click on a person and and have options such as "Add as friend [on Facebook" or "Invite to game"  None of the firms that did this addressed privacy concerns which was something that we struggled with when brainstorming.  Although it would cool if you were actually friends with someone on Facebook that it would alert you they were also on the plane.  Or maybe if you're really friends then you should know they are on the plane. 
• Further developing the website portion.  We actually built a website in silverlight, but we cut it from the final presentation because we thought there was a strict 6-8 min presentation length time limit.  8 mins goes by pretty fast when you are trying to describe a whole story and show off 10 screens. Plus it did need some work to add a "wow" factor and we ran out of time. Basically we were still coding it at Underground so it didn't seem like a good idea to show something we hadn't practiced talking about.The website showed more of the setup type stuff for your reservation like linking to Netflix to pick movies from your queue to load onto the plane, choosing your meal by dragging and dropping food choices from Wolfgang Puck and adding in hotel / car reservations. 

So what did we actually demo?

The iPhone.  It still brings me a sense of "child-like wonder" every time I use it.  I wanted to build something for the iPhone as soon as I read the problem statement.  I ended up building our iPhone reservation / virtual ticket system about an hour before we left the office.  I think this won it for us so that worked out well ;)

The scenario for this application that we talked about is that you have a flight booked today along with a hotel reservation and a car rental.  The flight gets canceled so the airline automatically reschedules you for another flight tomorrow.  You receive a text message about this with a link to view your updated itinerary.

The screen allows you to accept this rescheduled flight and optionally you can notify the connected hotel and car rental arrangements that your flight doesn't arrive until tomorrow.  You can also notify any friends or co-workers that you have designated in the reservation.  The idea is simplify the flight rescheduling process so you don't have to worry about notifying all of the additional parties involved.

The iPhone app layout is based on the template in iUI library.  I really liked the native iPhone app look and feel rather than creating a new layout.  I think it's far easier for people to use something that's a familiar interaction.

After accepting the updated flight you can also get a virtual boarding pass.  Rather than waiting inline at a kiosk to check-in or having to print it from your computer, you can get your boarding pass right on your phone.  This makes the process easier and faster without the waste of a paper ticket that's discarded an hour after you print it out.

A full video of the iPhone demo can be found here.

The next portion of the of our demo focused on the in-flight experience.  When a passenger sits down they are greeted by a "Welcome, <your name here>" screen.

We tried to create a menu with stylish look & feel with some glass-like touch panels for different parts of the app.  The menu includes options for Socializing (in-flight chat, facebook friends), navigation, Games (online games between passengers or download DS demo games via WiFi), Media, Service (order drinks, meal options, call for assistance) and Notifications.  You can't see it, but we had a 3D flip transition where all the panels combined to form each of the following screens.  It took me way too much time to code that and it only lasted about .8 seconds.

Above is the Media screen.  There are options for streaming music from iTunes, viewing photos from Flickr, watching movies from Netflix and reading books / magazines from Amazon.  We discussed how the system is connected to your Netflix account so before the flight it would pull down the next few movies from your queue or you could select which movies to pre-load onto the plane.  The focus here is that the entertainment is personalized to what you'd like to watch.  It also connects to Amazon to bring down recommended reading materials.

Using the awesome text rendering controls in WPF you can scroll through magazines and resize the text for your viewing pleasure.  You can also interactively browse and select new reading material.  If your like me and you like to run to gate as they are closing the plane doors, you might not have the time to pick up that magazine that you saw at the newsstand while you were sprinting past (not that I sprint, it's more of a clydesdale like trot).  This way you can still read the latest issue of Guns and Ammo or O on the plane.

The navigation screen is connected to Windows Live maps.  Rather than the typical plane GPS view you can follow along on the map and zoom in via the satellite or street view.  Flying over Vegas?  You can zoom in on the satellite view of the Bellagio to check it out in more detail.  It also displays Flickr photos geo-tagged to the current map location.  I've never been to Lake Tahoe, but maybe I'd see some cool photos of it while flying over and decide I'd like to fly there next.

The final screen we showed is the in-flight counterpart to the iPhone reservation app.  Using this screen you can adjust hotel or car reservations while in route.  You can also schedule a limo pickup that will notify the limo when your plane actually lands.  The notification screen is connected to a variety of existing services that are personalized to your reservation.

After looking at the screenshots, it seems like we could have built more but 2.5 days goes by quickly when you start from nothing.  Next time I definitely need to time box my 3D screen transition animations.

Big thanks to all of the judges, Carlos Segura, Jeremy Alexis and Scott Kinkaid. I'm truly honored that you chose our design over the other teams who all did an outstanding job. And thanks to the folks who planned this event and helped answer questions like Chris Bernard, Larry Clarkin, Dave Bost, Don Burnett along with Dale Jones and Jared Potter from Identity Mine. 

Also gracias to all the Clarity people that showed up the night of the competition.  Winning is one thing, but having all your co-worker friends there with you is awesome.  Kind of like when a 15 seed upsets Kansas in the NCAA tournament and everyone storms the court.  And obviously big thanks to my teammates Marlon Smith and Erik Klimzack for putting up with me for 2+ days in a confined space without sleep.  Most of you probably haven't enjoyed working with "The Kevin Marshall Experience", but think Matt Foley.

Only way more profanity. I get pretty fired up in a competition.

Other coverage of the event:

• David Armano delivered a great keynote speech to the event and wrote a follow-up post 
• Shellie Hall has some great video of the event here. [ummm....disregard Erik's comments about Silverlight.  He hadn't slept in 3 days :) ]

So what's next? All 6 regional winners will compete at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX on Monday, March 10th.  The PhizzPop site says "They will have approximately 90 days to complete their solutions.." I don't know what that's about.  72 hrs is abut my attention span. If that isn't a typo then I'm definitely going to need more Red Bull.

I talked to a lot of the other contestants during the competition but I didn't get everyone's contact info since it was kind of hectic.  I'd like to keep in touch so you can find me on Facebook or email me at kevin dot marshall AT claritycon dot com. It would be great to meet up again if any of you are going to Mix '08 or SxSW.

One other note.  I don't know if all the apps will be made available somewhere but Chris, Manny and Jared from Tribal DDB did some amazing stuff with Silverlight in 2 days.  Especially considering they were new to most of those tools. That spinning movie animation was sick.

Oh one last note. We're also looking to further develop our creative design ability as firm so if you or someone you know wants to help us design some innovative user experiences, contact me.  Did I mention you get to work with me :)