Affordances

Wayfinding: Spotlights > User Interface > Affordances

Aside from the notorious Zoom fatigue first reported in mid-2020, artists expressed dislike of other Zoom interface limitations. Carmel Clavin, for example, chose Crowdcast over Zoom when pivoting Richmond Fringe to an online-only experience in April 2020: ‘Crowdcast had more of a classroom feeling to it. And it also had these cool things like polls you could create, you could ask questions, and you could upvote polls and questions. So, people actually had action choices instead of just shouting into the void on the chat. … it allowed for more meaningful interaction’. She researched the affordances of the broadcasting platform, which may have forced the Richmond Fringe audience to download a new program to access shows, but the UX provided more fringe-friendly, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing options to better represent Clavin’s vision for her festival.

For Lighthouse at the End of the World, Andrew Hungerford combined the liveness of Zoom streaming with interactive features in another platform, Hapyak:

the first part of the show was me essentially reading from this book from my attic as a livestream, and then every 15 minutes the signal would cut out, and the audience would be presented with essentially like a DVD selection screen, and they could choose to continue that story or jump to a different story. … And then at the end it came back to a closing segment of my track, and then we would do a Zoom room afterwards, so people could hang out in the audience.

This remediated earlier forms (DVD menu) along with pandemic forms (Zoom livestream direct address); everything was combined into Hapyak for easy use. By creating a ‘DVD menu’ appearance, Hungerford and the design team helped onboard the audience using the UI’s appearance, so they could immerse themselves in the story.