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When Kevin first visits the website, he finds the home page displaying a list of the upcoming games in his city. He can change the city, filter games, search for games of a particular property (eg. keyword, organizer, date, time, location, rank) via a dropdown list, and sort the games by similar properties via a dropdown list. He can click see more for more games to append themselves to the games list. Because he does not have an account, he cannot see details of the games. Kevin can log in or register to gain more access to the system.
Kevin clicks on the register button and is presented with the registration page. He fills out the information required and creates his account. The information will populate his public profile.
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The filtered result gave Kevin one game. He decides to click on the game details to learn more. The page includes information about the game, as well as a Join button for Kevin to easily join. When he clicks on join, a dropdown list presents him with options to join as a player, referee, casual interloper, or observer. After Kevin clicks one of the options, the Leave button will replace the Join button. The right side pane changes to a list of all the participants of the game. Clicking on a participant entry will send Kevin to that person’s profile page.
After joining the game, Kevin decides to look at George’s profile. He clicks on George’s name in the games list and comes across Geroge’s profile page. The profile page includes George’s personal information as well as a list of his future games and past games. Near George’s name is an Add Buddy button which Kevin clicks. (Side note: When Kevin views his own profile, the Edit Profile button replaces the Add Buddy button). The right side pane displays all of George’s buddies. Clicking on a buddy will redirect Kevin to that buddy’s profile page.
Analysis
Good Points:
- Information is presented in a simple manner on the homepage.
- The design provides commonly-seen affordances such as glow-on-mouse-hover for entries in lists, buttons, icons with links (join, leave), drop-down arrows, and side-arrows that indicate “details”
- Joining and leaving games require very little clicks, making the design efficient for these tasks.
- Creating a game is efficient when on the homepage.
- Design allows for searching and filtering.
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The boxes on the home page make the games very visible. Given that the core functionality of the site is to connect players with games that they would be interested in, this design decision makes sense. The parameters are laid out logically to enable good learnability. If we use javascript on the filter selections, then the user would be able to figure out the implications of each option with great immediacy. However, some efficiency is sacrificed with the design. Many games cannot be viewed at once when the games take up large screen area. It wouldn't make sense from a speed standpoint to load all available games at once so a button must be clicked to display additional games. An expert user might rather have a large list of games without the box interface to assimilate more information quickly. The drop downs on the time option and the slide bars on the skill range will help limit error prevention. If we can implement a standard list of valid locations we can also do some error prevention on the location criterion.
Design 3
This design uses simple lists to display all the information. This design mostly relies on text to convey the information. Lists are sortable, and the list of games is searchable through filters.
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