GR2 - Designs

Scenario

Task 1- Post Status
Kiki is a freshman at Senior House, and just got out of her last class of the day-- it’s 1pm. It’s a bright and beautiful Friday and all she wants to do is start the weekend early by exploring the greater Boston area and doing something crazy.  Kiki places herself at Senior House on the map, indicates she is feeling adventurous, and says what she is interested in doing.

Task 2- Browsing the Map
Kiki’s friend Gigi is a sophomore at EC, and does not have class on Friday.  He is trying to figure out what he wants to do, and looks at his open Marauder’s Map.  At the moment, his website is populated with a lot of friends and he is having a hard time going through them all.

Task 3- Managing Friends
He decides that what he wants to do is focus on friends who are single, and who are girls. To optimize this process, he creates a group with all of these girls.

Task 4- Change Visibility
With his new group in place, aptly named “Single Ladies”, Gigi applies the tag to his Marauders Map so that his single female friends are the only ones visible on his map. When he sees Kiki and her status on the map, he  jumps at the idea to wander with her.

Task 5- Instant Messaging Friend
To communicate with Kiki, Gigi sends her an instant message.  They talk further about a plan, and then meet up shortly after.

Designs

DESIGN #1:

General Layout:

Storyboard: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Analysis:

This design uses a lot of buttons and tabs for navigation. All of these have intuitive text labels that tell the user what they do. This makes it easier for a user to understand website options than icons alone. Organizationally, the tabs separate different types of buttons, and therefore break up the functionality of the website into digestible segments for the user.  The site also draws from the ribbon design that is applied by many programs such as Microsoft Word and Maya.  Having a familiar design strategy will help the user intuit what to do.  However, this program does not support quite as many options as Microsoft Word or Maya, so implementing the ribbon design may be overkill. It may be easier to understand and efficiently navigate the site if more options were presented in the opening toolbar and spaced around the site. One successful user interface that does this is Gmail. The chat, tags, and mail creator are all in the same view space, and require only one click (not two) to access.

The map in this interface is the core component of its use. Because of this fact, the design provides the map with most of the page space and allows for easy viewing and perusing.  The statuses of the users on the map are indicated by the color dots that represent them, so searching by status can be done in a glance.  To avoid clutter, further information regarding the activities of people on the map is not shown; instead, the user must hover over user icons to see what they have written. Because this is less efficient than a feed style layout, the ability to tag groups of users and search by name with the visibility lists is made available. In addition, the chat window is only opened up into view once a conversation has been initiated, so that visibility of the map is only compromised once a user has found people to communicate with.

One thing that seems to stand out as an issue in navigating of the map is the Map Navigator. The Map Navigator operates by splitting up the maps into different pieces that can be added by the user. This breaks the flow the map and navigation is less advanced than most map-based sites like Google Maps.

The ability to use map segments and tags allows users to go through the site mostly through clicks. Common processes in posting can be saved as shortcuts as well, so common postings do not have to be redone. If a user makes a tag, map, or shortcut that they do not want, they can simply right click the button that represents the shortcut, and delete it. If the user accidentally deletes one of these items, the paths to recreate them are short and simple enough that it is not a problem to redo them.