Get Help!

This is our second assignment that we have to do solo.
hmmm....still like the fun of working with others, but sometimes still have to do things alone.

We have to discuss about user interface & interaction design.

Interface Design

This is something really crucial to an application,
it gives you the first impression and also affects all parts of the application.
The interface design will also both conscious and subconsciously affects how the user feel about this app and gives the mood to the entire app.
Playfish interface designs is one of my favorites in Facebook...
It's UI simple but good designs and also with it's catchy but not too flashy music really gives me a calm/relax mood.

Interaction Design:

It's just like the whole flow of the application,
Imagine traveling in mrt and you don't know the direction and all the signs are misunderstanding and the train sometimes leads you to somewhere else...
what will you do?
Maybe get a taxi and not take mrt anymore.
So with a bad user interaction design, people will just slowly leave the app.
This is not only limited to the outer design, the coding will also affect how the app work.
Programmers also have to compromise to fit in to their limited resource,
if their server is slow many things that loads too slow have to be cut down or have other solutions to it.
Interaction designs also require much testing to prove that is alright.

gethelp facebook application:

This concept of tapping into facebook large social network to create a app to allow people to post thing that they neeed help is good.
The platform is quite suitable for this.
Many people that might need help will use this app.

1. Usability vs Aesthetics:

The UI is generally quite nice.
The only thing the icon beside "What do you want to ask?"
Can't really see any relation to that.
The slanting tab is cool for me, though not aesthetic to be slanting.
It's looks great and special, rather than good old normal ones.
There's one weird thing, not sure if it's just screenshot issue, the application seems to be slightly overlapping and covering the facebook tabs.
Unsure of what the content of all these tabs are, the "Badges" details should be either integrated in "Profile" or "Stats" page too.
However I still think it's ok to leave it there.
One important thing is missing here,
since people who first encounter this app might not need to use is to post any help at that moment,
people might not remember it one day that they really need to use this app for help.
The app might lose a lot of users because of this.
So, I suggest that a button or a reminder to bookmark this page or something like that in the homepage might be really useful.
Providing sms service will incure cost on developers, I would suggest to compile their friends no. for them to see.

2. Number of options / freedom given to user when posting a need.

The no. of options here are too little.
From my first look, I don't know what does the "estimated time" mean.
Not sure if there is a dropdown bar or something deadline, tag, location.
Everything will be much more organize if there is.
The tag should also have many specific tags to let the choose from, like IT,games,school,recreation, etc.
This will also in turn organize the database and create specialize tags so that people with specialize skill can go directly into their forte to look for what they can help.
Thus, Users can also find very helpful things quicker and better.

In the "who do you want to ask":
these choices are far too little, there should be more specific choices to choose from.

The solution:
The screenshot page actually suits quite well for "quick help"
but that is definitely not enough to satisfy many things.
Putting something like another "Advance Help" page would certainly be very helpful.
This will benefit both people who just want to quickly post their help and people who really want specific help.

Advance Help page should roughly include:
i) Customize "I need help with" so that user can enter whatever they like as the header.
ii)Much more detailed choices to choose and input in the request for help.
iii)Besides of asking those in the choices as in the screenshot adding network and/or network combinations to ask will also be very helpful.
and some others more details thing to be more specific with the help needed.

3. Cycle of interaction & incentives (Are the elements of the app engaging?)

The incentive given is not really very good and might possibly even create trouble like spamming.
People just need to post more answer to gain badges,
So this mean they can anyhow post anything and then get high rank. This is really wrong right?
Here we can incorporate User-Generated-Content, who are we to decide who's gets the most badges..
We can ask others to vote for the best advice and have many good posts.
Another thing that is that the naming of the ranking could be better by using name that has a more clear hierarchy.
There is one very good solution that I have to quote from Yuming’s post
“everyone is given a set of points at the start. When you post a question, u have to offer points to the helper who gave the most useful answer. This has at least 3 benefits. First the helpers are more enticed to answer the question with the top points. Second, if u need help urgently, u just need to dump all your points to attract all the good/greedy samaritans. Third, If you run out of points, u can wait for the system to handout points periodically (think gst offset package) or u can answer questions to earn points. By facilitating such a vicious cycle, the population can be self-sustained."
This is really a brilliant idea that Experts-Exchange(EE) uses.
I want to further add to this. This app can "borrow" what we learnt from Elven Blood.
It can use the way Elven Blood users have to earn their "blessings" which in gethelp will be points in order to post more questions.
I would also like to add a loan points section so that desperate users can still seek help when he/she doesn't have any points left.
Then developers can even earn money through these surveys and gain more users to use their app..
cool....

4. Other problems you think the team might have faced:

i)When I looked at the 1st screenshot, I notice the name of the app is called "Get Done!"
This is definitely a very bad name for people to search. Nobody will ever search for "done" if they need help.
A good search term is very important for an application publicity.
ii)It might be better to put homepage as overview of this app with other users help request, so that users will also see others help, or else they might only post helps but less people doing the helping.



erm.....I think I wrote too much words....
I shall edit again....