At the Beaney Museum, Canterbury
For this project, I was tasked with documenting and improving a touchscreen interface used in The Beany Museum in Canterbury. This required me to work with existing code. The previous project had been designed in Unity, so my first task was to analyse the code and work out how the project had been structured.
Old inputs
Due to the age of the project, the code that handled inputs was outdated and needed to be updated before the project would function properly. Shown below is an example of the old and new input code.
Old input code
New input code
Understanding the code
Once I got the project working, I ran tests to better understand how the code affected the interface. To ensure that any future programmer maintaining the system would not have to go through the same process, I analysed all of the scripts and added comments to them.
On top of commenting on the code, I was responsible for creating external documentation detailing how the interface works. I documented what happened on each page and how each script connected, to make debugging easier for future developers.
Changes made to the animation page
The main change I made to the interface was on the animation page, adding functionality to make the page more useable. This interface is run all day in the museum and used by its visitors, so the animation had to be able to be reset for new users. I added two reset buttons to ensure that new users would be able to remove existing animation and start afresh.
To create the original animation, the bird pieces (below) had to be moved to their desired location and then the user pressed a button to save their location in that frame. I changed this functionality to save automatically once each piece is moved, to remove the chance that the user might forget to save their work. Also, in the original design, when moving to the next frame, all the pieces would fall back to their default positions, which I changed so that they stayed in the same position as the last frame. This created better consistency and user experience.
Full list of changes made to the interface
