Case Study: GetHelp

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Honestly speaking, I had no idea of UI designing before taking CS3216, nor do I have any sense of designing. I read two articles, Identifying conflicts in a UI design and A Summary for User-Interface Design Principles , before analyzing the UI of GetHelp. I would try to apply some of those principles to this case study.

Who the users are

This is the most important point to think about when building an application. All the functionalities and UI should be decided based on this point. For GetHelp, there are two categories of users: those need help and those offer help. Based on the design of “homepage”, it seems the developers mainly focused on the help-seekers. Help-seekers can find it easy to ask for helps. But help-providers, the contributors of this app, may feel difficult to find the projects that they can help.

My suggestion is putting the “overview” at the “homepage”, where there are mainly three sections: the helps are being needed, recently solved helps, and the leader board.

Consistency

The consistency includes two parts: being consistent with the system, Facebook platform in this case; and being consistent within the app itself.

This app is quite consistent with the external platform, Facebook. It uses the same font and font color as Facebook. That makes users fell smooth transition from Facebook to this app.

However, it is really bad regarding the consistency within the app itself. The top buttons are not consistent. It is reasonable if the developers want users’ focus paid to “Badget”,” Stats”,”Profiles”,and “Invite”(I will discuss this later). It is really unacceptable that the positions of “overviews” and “recommendations” change in different pages. Moreover, the bottom of ”Badget”,” Stats”,”Profiles”,and “Invite” are hidden by the middle pad in “project page”, in figure 3.

Features and focuses

Developers definitely want users focus on the features of their app. In GetHelp, the top right buttons, ”Badget”,” Stats”,”Profiles”,and “Invite”, do attract my attention. However, are they all the features? At least, I don’t think “Profile” and “Invite” are important for me when using this app.

When creating a new project, the red button, “call for help”, draws more attention than the detail information, which is in grey. Also since the “call for help” is just behind the text area of adding title, it is likely users click that button after typing title, without filling detail information. It seems all the check boxes are selected by default. It makes me feel very confused how I can select both “ask all friends” and “pick some friends” and the same time.

My suggestion is putting the button”call for help” below the detailed information. Making the color of the detailed information brighter. Hiding the SQL query information, which is of  no meaning to users.

Navigation and visualization

From the given screenshots, I could not find out how to navigate to “project” page, figure 3. That may just because not all information is given. But I do think a hight of current tap should be added, like “Profile” in figure1. Thins can users have a clear idea when they are.