- Scenario
Jennifer -- female, attends Brown, majoring in creative writing, likes writing fanfic for Harry Potter, and she’s doing a NaNoWriMo fic with her creative writing group
Troll -- a user who posts offensive comments
Jennifer creates a new project, inviting the rest of her group to be part of it. Jennifer writes the first section of the fic, and posts it. Troll reads Jennifer’s section and comments on it, offensively. Jennifer uses her power as a moderator to delete Troll’s comment.
- Designs
- Design 1
- Design 2
- Main page. Jennifer clicks the large button at the bottom of the scene to log in
- Once logged in, Jennifer sees this page, listing the projects she's working on, and the projects she has saved as her favourites
- By clicking the Create button at the bottom of the screen, Jennifer navigates to a page allowing her to create a new project
- Jennifer saves the new project and begins working on it
- After Jennifer has posted her new section, and left, Troll reads Jennifer's section and posts a rude comment
- Jennifer, returning, uses her power as moderator to delete the comment by clicking the underlined delete below the comment. A confirmation dialogue will pop up to ensure that she realizes that she is deleting that particular comment.
- Analysis: Learnabilibity
- The nonstandard screen arrangement may make it difficult for new users to locate other necessary buttons and links. discuss wheel metaphor
- Analysis: Visibility
- Screen real estate concerns. Good big buttons on the edge of the screen. Can see old text when entering new.
- Analysis: Efficiency
- The interface has an internally consistent shape and location of buttons, which allows new users to intuit where the most necessary buttons will be for their current task.
- Analysis: Error Prevention
- Everything has cancel buttons; delete comments (and sections, though not discussed in this storyboard) will have confirmation dialogues
- Design 3
- Home page. Displays quick links to fics she has viewed recently, and also displays fics that she may be interested in. To create a new fic she clicks on the "My Fics" tab.
- The "My Fics" tab displays any fics that Jennifer is the author of, sorted by last date modified. She can interact with them, but chooses to click the "Create new" button at the top of the page.
- After clicking the "Create new" button, a modal dialog pops up and displays the options for creating a new fic. The background is grayed out until she clicks the "Create" or "Cancel" button. The textboxes for adding authors/readers will have smart autocomplete based on people Jennifer has worked with before and other factors. The only two features that are not self-explanatory ("collaboration" and "timeout") have a help button next to them that will pop up helpful descriptive text.
- After creating the new fic, Jennifer decides to edit it. From the "My Fics" tab, she clicks on the new entry and it pops up another modal The editor will also periodically auto-save, and prompt to save any unsaved changes when Jennifer clicks "Close".dialog box. This box displays a rich text editor with the ability to save her progress and return later.
- After writing on the fic, Jennifer goes back and discovers some comments. The sidebar now displays some information on the fic, as well as quick chapter navigation buttons. Comments are found at the bottom of the page. Since Jennifer is logged in as a moderator, the "Block User" link appears in the upper right of all comments. This allows her to remove the comment and prevent that user from commenting on the fic in the future.
- Analysis: The good points of this design are that it closely matches the design of websites that users will be familiar with. Tab navigation is well-known, and helps simplify the layout. Navigation is at the top, information is under the tabs, and the sidebar has quick navigation and, when viewing a fic, metadata about the fic. In addition, the rich text editor will somewhat resemble Google Docs, which in turn closely resembles a very streamlined version of Microsoft Word. In general, all actions are reversible. The editor has an auto-save feature, accidental fics can be deleted, and navigation errors can easily be fixed. Any mistaken configuration of a fic during its creation can be modified later from the "My Fics" tab. Overall, this design is familiar, simple, and user-friendly. The only part that may be problematic is the sidebar. It may be confusing for the user for it to be displaying different information when reading a fic than at all other times. At the same time, that information does need to be available, and the sidebar was the only place with space.