My Case Study on Get help~

Appearance

The overall visual impression of the interface is fine. It's neat and in concord with the Facebook theme. Clearly to me that they are skilled at UI crafting. What is obviously missed, however, is a striking logo, which I think every app of such kind should have one consistently in the top left of the page.

Home Page

If it was me who were to design this page, i would probably end up with a similar layout (maybe not as nice, but it does remind me of the considerations when designing Campus Sale) for the first iteration. I would try to make it the simplest as possible, but still want to include all those I think is necessary into the layout, and in the end I would find I have to put quite some amount of text down below the search bar('call for help!'). For an app like this, that detailed search form appearing in the first page isn't very user friendly. It makes the user hesitate before the complexity to use, or at least make them think about it. What about just hide them in a collapsed header, if user wants, he/she can just expand it themself. A better way is, the detail form as well as other options for posting a need be all moved to a second page which user will see after clicking the call for help button.

I think only including the 'new project' functionality in the home page is a bit waste. Instead of the various options, information from overview page should appear in the area below the get help bar, to provide user with a more general view.

Overview Page

the overview page is quite in point, pretty much the same as how I imagine an app like this should be. For the navigation buttons on the top, I know they wanted to play some tricks to make it fancy, but I still prefer an upright position to tilted ones (at least don't tilt the text).

Statistics

People may want to keep a page like this, but if I were a user, I won't look at this page becoz it is of little value to me. Those titles are not very meaningful. Such things can't be incentives, do people put in lot of time and labor just to get some useless title in the stats page? if the app gets popular, there will be many of them that have helped quite a lot ppl, then how do we distribute the titles? Are we going to create hundreds of different titles, should we see hundreds of good samaritans, or should there be only a few getting titles out of thousands that helped a lot?

This is not Yahoo Answer, where a very high score indicates a good knowledge, and therefore a slightly higher chance to know the answer to your question. Here you want to get things done, not just ask questions, even there is someone who has helped dozens of people then what? Maybe a veteran just helped dozens of recruits from nearby camps install their plasma rifles. If the thing you want to do is irrelevant then it is just irrelevant, looking at the samaritans will hardly give you any clue. Other stats like ppl sparked the most fires and hottest project maker is totally meaningless to me. If developer insists on keeping stats as a major tab page, I'd say only the Great Gurus might be worthy to keep track of since those with knowledge of different people are somewhat likely to help you find the helper.

Badges

Some of the points I've covered in Statistics part already. The badge system is ok, since it's a minor feature.. but If you want to rely on it as an incentive for people to offer help, that will be a naive idea.

Another thing I want to point out is the overuse of metaphors in the webpage like project to 'fire'. That makes the app look less serious, after all, this app is to help ppl get things done. Developers kinda outsmarted themselves by creating so many metaphors.

Some post scriptum: I'm afraid, there won't be many using this app. Though I can see the effort by developers trying to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, the complexity overweighs the usability. If one needs help, what I often see are updated statuses, and these are often well engaged by people already. We don't have many people in this world who would raise needs so frequently that will need a help asking manager(unless there's a profession called problem raiser). A standalone app that needs extra effort to setup is really hard to attract inpatient people out there today.