Jennifer Egan
Experimental, Immersive Experience
To promote her new book, Manhattan Beach, author Jennifer Egan wanted a new website that immersed visitors in the scenery, setting and conceptual mood of the book. Under my UX/Design shop, Team Eight, our team of three were excited to take this on. It was not a typical request and it challenged much of our approach to user experience on the web. But we had worked with Jenny before and there was a lot of trust there.
As much of the book takes place under the waters around Manhattan in the 1940’s, we knew we wanted to create something that provided a rich sense of space, but remained murky and mysterious. We went through an abnormal amount of exploration, prototyping and testing to hone in on a concept and approach. We decided against using WebGL as it would leave out much of the Jenny’s target audience. Instead we built the experience around a hybrid of HTML5 canvas, CSS3 perspective and javascript that allowed us to include over 90% of Jenny’s historical site visitors including viewers on android and apple phones, or in chrome and safari. Visitors on any non-supported browser or device still get the full website, but with a limited version of the bonus underwater experience.
