Final screen shots

These are just a few screen shots of my re-worked flash interface.

New design for the 'Logo'

These are a few designs with which I feel are more unique to other barcodes, but still will have a barcode aspect to them with different colours in different places. Also the pattern would also be slightly different but with the same overall design.

Presentation advise

After presenting Paul and Helen suggested a few aspects that I could work on too improve the overall concept.

The fonts were to mixed and didn't follow any one theme.

Having never used a iPhone I didn't know that the Home button wasn't the back button but would instead close the application. So will need to create a seperate return button. 

The picture of the website buttons on the top of the screen has no relation to iPhones. 

The 'Logo' was still not unique enough. will talk to Paul more about ideas around how this could be done in the next tutorial. 

Flash progress

For my Flash part of the project I have kept the user interface as simple as I could with the idea of people viewing the information whilst out shopping. Once a product has been scanned by the devise (for my Flash interface I have used the iPhone as the example) the main page will load and show the E.C.R of the item, plus the same for similar products available with the lowest E.C.R rating in their range. There is also the option to view the others products and their ratings by pressing the button at the bottom of the screen. As the user moves their finger over any of the ratings it will enlarge, upon pushing down on the rating it will load the information page of that particular product. This page would include all of the energy that the product has used on average during the growing, making, packaging and transportation before being a finished product. The user also has the option of pressing the heading on the main page which would load another information page, but this would be about E.C.R and how it can help with energy saving and looking toward less usage in the future.

Final logo design

My final design is just a small changed version of one of my previous logos, the reason I changed the 'energy per watt' was because it didn't really fit with the units of measurement I am after. So instead I have used per 100g as at the moment I am basing my logo to be placed on supermarket items first. I am still not sure how I would be able to measure all of the mileage, labour, product growth etc. into one type of unit. But for now I have chosen to represent this over all energy consumption as EU (Energy Units) and just assuming that this measuring unit has already been found. So on my logo it shows a (x)EU amount, this amount is also shown by the red/green bar for a more visual glance feedback. Red being how much has been used according to 100g, while the greener the bar the better the products energy consumption rating (E.C.R).

This is my final logo design:

Flash interaction

After thinking about my overall design and how it would be presented, I decided that making it in Flash would be the best option due to me choosing to have it as a multi paged website. Inside of Flash I would need to have buttons to navigate through the pages. For the first page, the comparison page/front page, I would need the user to be able to press on the products, which would then in turn take them to the more information page linked with that specific item. So I would need to have as many buttons as there were products able to be pushed, and for each button a page related to the product. This brings me to how many products would I have displayed... I don't want too many other wise it becomes either too much to sort through or too much to read. The solution that I came up with was to have the scanned product at the top of the screen, and then in the case of multiple other brands the only others displayed on the main screen would be the lowest energy consumers in their field. Again giving companies more incentive to lower energy usage if they want their products visible, while at the same time speeding up the 'finding the best product' part for the viewer.

This is what I came up with as an example:

Interface thoughts and ideas

For the interface side of things Paul gave me the ok not to make it in flash and just to make a website out of Photoshop, which wouldn’t need to be interactive. The main thing that I wont to be displayed is the comparison of the product to similar products on the market from other companies, the reason for this would be to really enforce the 'name and shame' to companies. With information about companies currently hard to find on the web or not even available, the general public would never know how much energy they are really using. So to get companies to change the best way I feel would be to have it right there in front of you, the first thing that would pop up as you scanned an item. Also having that item and company compared to others without the need to separately search website after website.

Because this would be something that you would do while you would be shopping, I feel that the whole process of checking products shouldn't be hard to navigate, or have pages and pages to read. Therefore each product would only need to have a small amount of information, just a small page worth and nothing that would take hours to read.

So the first page would have the scanned product and a few other similar brands which are all compared, the user can then decide wither to buy that product or to choose one of the less energy consuming products, without having to scan each product separately. The user can then press one of the shown products and that would redirect them to the page which would have more information specific to that product. That would be all that I think is needed, simple easy to navigate and not too much reading to be done.