Role:
- Principal Product Designer
Skills:
- User experience design
- User interface design
- Prototyping
- Dark Theme & UI design
Tools:
- Design thinking
- Paper Prototyping
- Sketch
- Zeplin
- Slack
Customer(s):
- Swim
- All Potential Customers
- All Would Be Adopters
Solution:
- Web-based application
- Domain connection(s)
- Real-time access
- Network monitoring
- Situational awareness
- Multiplayer game
- Single surface application
An Engaging Multiplayer Single Surface Experience, That Became Our Top Sales Demo :)
Ripple is a unique multiplayer online portal game that highlights the capabilities of the Swim platform. We created Ripple as a multi-screen experience, where any number of players interact on a shared digital surface in real-time. It then quickly became our top sales demo!
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The Unmet Need
Swim had a need for a sales demo that would convey the concepts and capabilities of Swim without all the domain or subject matter expertise that is usually required for enterprise real-time continuous application experiences.
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An Abstract Domain Agnostic Demo You Say?!
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Swim in the abstract allows users access to streaming data, the state of those entities that are streaming (via streaming APIs), and interact with those streaming entities (stateful web agents) via a real-time continuous UI.
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How would the team create an application demo that would be domain agnostic and general purpose enough to not require domain expertise?
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Enter Ripple!
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The Concept
The concept of Ripple is a fun story. All things in our real world ripple. All things vibrate in connected space. Some things communicate via audio waves, some via RF waves, some via signals, some via vibration. But the fact is all things "ripple" in connected space.
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So what does a ripple look like? How do you visualize a thing communicating and/or simply vibrating in a connected digital space.
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How do you visualize these vibrations in real-time? We had the answer all along, all things ripple and let's just visualize all things rippling. Then the idea of Ripple becoming a mutiplayer shared experience, a single surface, where players would tap to ripple and hold to connect. Tap to ripple! Tap to communicate! That's it!
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Tap to Ripple! ... That's It! :)
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Each tap is a communication from a single entity (a user/player), sent and received via an ultra-low latency platform and GUI framework. All updates are displayed as quickly as the network allows, with no buffering or lapses. This can be contrasted with REST-based applications, which frequently experience “buffer-bloat” as updates are received faster than they can be processed. By maintaining a persistent streaming connection, SWIM can continuously observe for state changes and “ripple” the news to peers who have subscribed. In this way, updates are shared seamlessly across edge, gateway, cloud and back.
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Our intent with Ripple is to demonstrate the similarity between Ripple and many other streaming applications. In the real world, data sources like traffic signals, industrial machines, vehicles, sensors and mobile devices all similarly ripple. With SWIM, it’s easy to “bond” with any data source and combine it with other data sources and business logic to construct intelligent applications that power collaboration, automation, operations or any other real-time use case.
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Thus was born the top sales demo for Swim ever! Let's Ripple was now a thing!
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Ripple has been demonstrated at Developer Week with hundreds of audoence members "rippling" at the same time (see page header image for actual screenshot from the show), and has been a go to demonstration for others to experience the actual capabilities of the Swim platforn.
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Tap to Ripple .... tap and hold to connect. It was so simple that didn't require a SME from any domain or industry. Just tap, ripple and ask as many questions as one would like! What is this? Why is it soo fast? Can we do this with our assets in real-time? Where has this been my whole life? On and on, these were the questions we wanted to answer, and we did! What do you see when you ripple? What entities are you communicating with? ​
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UX:
- User experience research
- User experience design
- User interface design
- Prototyping
- Visual design
- Project coordination
I See Satellites! Wait, I See Buses!
They are both correct of course, from a certain point of view. The beauty of Ripple is that it is whatever the audience wants it to be. Abstract art if you will.
If you are a traffic engineer that has been monitoring traffic lights, etc for the last 5+ years the ripples are emitting from traffic intersections. If you are a space warfighter in Space Force the ripples are emitting from satellites in orbit around our earth.
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Ripple is Abstract Art! It's Whatever You Want it to be!
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The ripples are rippling and communicating with the player, and are emitting from whatever the player wants to see. Transit authority operators see buses rippling as they drive through the city, while a military officer see a squad of soldiers on the ground communicating current status and position.
Ripple allows you (the customer or developer) to see not just what you want to see but what you need to see.
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Let's Ripple!
Our experience has been that everyone wants to Ripple!
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Once someone from Swim shares the Ripple url with a conference room full of people, and people start rippling, the questions start getting asked. All the right questions.
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How does Nstream (Swim) do this?
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Is this what I think it is?
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Is this the same surface? On and on ...
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These of course are the questions we actually want. These are the questions and the eventual answers that lead to signed contracts (with PoC efforts of course). Ripple has served its purpose ten times over and has been a mainstay of the Swim capabilities pitch for over 4+ years.
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If you want to Ripple, go to the link below. Share the link with as many friends as you like and I hope you hav fun!
Tap to ripple ... tap and hold to connect!
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https://demos.nstream.io/ripple/
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The impact of stateful entities acting on behalf of real-world and/or digital agents is no doubt a massive technological leap. The ability to interact with these stateful agents and the ability for them to communicate to you (the human) only when they need to (when they need attention or human intervention) is an even more massive leap for the augmentation of the human intelligence in real-time.
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The Power of Now is here!
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An entity marker (icon) rippling on a geo map has become a staple of the Swim/Nstream application UI experience, and gives user's the confidence that if it's not rippling, all is good. The system is performant in the now!
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If the system is non-performant, at any given time it will absolutely communicate to you through ripples, hue shifts (cool to warm) and focused zoom and span.
