Review of Mockup4

The final review of the Devcathlon is my group, Mockup6.

How many "clicks" does it take to get to the center of what you're looking for?

I think our group tried to present so much information on one page. So the price we had to pay was that it requires users to click a lot of things to show everything. Of course, this can be solved with an "expand all" type link. Once users get used where things are, then the selective collapse and expand concept will be useful.

This design can be good and bad. We need to be careful on where and when to use this. Anthony took the time to understand how to get expanding and collapsing to work with AJAX and JavaScript. However, we didn't have time to see the final product and discuss it's effectiveness. In the end, it was cool but there was concerns if the use is suited for its purpose in class.

I think we used it best in our "Team" page. It fulfilled multiple purposes. First it presents all members in a simple list. But what if I wanted to look at who the strongest member is? Instead of navigating through each member's page, we can now expand their card by clicking the member's name and comparing two or more at a time.

Forms

We didn't get the chance to redo a lot of the forms. So we have the same problems as I've mentioned in my previous mockup reviews. The forms need to be reconstructed in a way where it doesn't seem overwhelming but still cover a lot of aspects. White space helps this.

Also as mentioned before in the other review, we could use some extra components like a calendar widget to help facilitate input. I saw some really interesting ideas in another mockup and think we can use a combination of everything in my proposal for Devcathlon.

Layout and Organization

I must admit, things varied on a page by page basis. We have two different expanding and collapsing features. One that actually shows the animation of collapsing (using SpryCollapseablePanels), while the other is an instantaneous collapse and expand. I credit both of my teammates for exploring these options. If we all finsihed the same time, we probably would have went with the SpryCollapseablePanel to maintain consistency.

But everyone's pages still maintained a nice level of readability. Anthony's team page used well placed white spaces in the expanding cells. Nicely centered with good padding all around. It really made it readable despite all the information it held.

Strengths:

1. Expand/Collapse --- This is definitely something useful that will help. This helps reduce the amount of information shown unless requested for by the user.

2. Badges/Achievement --- I like our achievement page mainly because I think unattained badges are shown in a nullified way. It is grayed out.

Weaknesses:

1. Inconsistent Tools --- We should have used the same collapse/expand throughout all our pages.

2. My Profile --- Too much content horizontally. Needs to be redesigned to neatly arrange the Inbox and Actions menu.

3. Redundancy --- Inbox and Actions appears on both the home page and the profile page. Although not a major issue, it's probably better to commit to only one place so users don't get confused. Initially we were going to take out the home page. But we forgot to relink the logged in page and remove the home page.