Saturday, February 20, 2010

Project Case Study

GetHelp! is one interesting app. Overall, the UI design is good and simple, some functions such as "Badge" is not well introduced, which might leads to some confusion to the users. Here are some suggestions regarding the layout (homepage) of the application below:

Before



After


The app basically lack the most important element of branding, that is the app logo. The logo of the app should be shown on all the pages in order to leave stronger impression to the users. It will be convenient for people to recognize the app, especially to those who are not the app users and happen to see in on others user account page.

The front page of the app is quite empty in term of features shown. As you can see above, I have suggested to put some News Feed on the front page, showing latest help needed and top helper of the week. This makes this front page more informative and hence users are not required to do extra step just to find out some general information. I have also added a box showing the users' friends who also added the same application. This can actually improve the stickiness as it reminds them that they are not alone.

The navigation buttons on top should be more consistent by assigning the same button layout on "Overview" and "Recommendation" so that they look more obvious. There should also be a link to introduction and instruction on how to use the app. Current home page design is a bit messy, having the form (for additional details) displayed on the same page. Users would tend to missed out the form below the main text field. I suggest that the form to be displayed after the user pressed the "call for help" button:


This light box effect can actually help the user to focus on the form better.


Next, the "Statistic" page can be improved by using graphical diagram to represent the contribution/score of the users. Nicknames can be accompanied with small icon, allowing users to distinguish the "class" better:

Overall, i think this application is well planned and designed in term of GUI. However, the actual user experience (such as the UI flows, content richness) cannot be evaluated as there's no working app to be tested.

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