Connections Wall
A communal interactive experience full of personalized moments of discovery that encourages new hires to break the ice, connect with each other and with their company’s global impact. This 50 foot wide digital interactive greets Facebook’s new hires with an communal way to get to know one another. Dozens of people can simultaneously explore which aspects of their lives connect them and learn more about their place in the company they’re joining. Data and media gathered from the social network’s API are served up as playful particles drifting across a 50 million pixel touchscreen canvas. Orientation staff control it all remotely with a mobile CMS.
👤 Role: Software Engineer, Tech Lead, Concept Design, UX Design
A part of Facebook’s employee on-boarding for years, this project has seen thousands of new hires. Pleased with the results, Facebook deployed it internationally, and brought us back to add multiple rounds of new features.
Highlights
Prototypes And Testing
How would we create an app with particle systems, physics, hundreds of interactive elements, capable of playing multiple high-resolution videos at once, all while delivering a smooth and responsive experience to dozens of users? As soon as the concept for the project became clear, I assembled my dev team to identify risks and plan feasibility studies, prototypes, and tests.
For example, we acquired our target hardware and developed a kitchen sink prototype. We identified all the things our app might be doing simultaneously and, as fast as we could, created an app that did them all. This allowed us to identify pain points early, develop a multithreading strategy, and keep performance tuned from the very start of the project. It wasn’t pretty, but it answered the biggest questions fast!
Later in the project, as interactive features began to accumulate, we developed a gremlin, a test app that mimicked touch hardware and delivered a storm of touches all across the screen. By regularly hammering the app in this way, we surfaced bugs quickly and made it that much more robust.
Visual Communication And Documentation
Clear documentation was crucial to this project. To ensure that the client’s unique security and reliability requirements were met, we performed detailed analyses and rigorously documented every aspect of the project. With three programmers collaborating on a multi-threaded code-base, it was essential that we maintained the same mental model of the system. We met regularly to align on our dev challenges and strategies with the help of use-case, state, and sequence diagrams. The discipline paid off. Programmers weren’t breaking each other’s code. Bugs were easy to hunt down. The app performed great. By the time we were installing, we had confidence that our work was rock solid.
