Design 1
This design caters more towards competitive players and combo researchers than the novices, although there are features for them as well. This design also requires that you have an account, as the main part of the user interface allows you to track combos that you have favorite-d or want to learn in the future, as well as combos that you have submitted yourself. Once you've signed in, the tabs at the top determine which set of combos you're looking at: the "My Combos" tab shows combos that you have created and submitted to the site, the "Favorites" tab shows the combos that you have favorite-d (due to liking them generally or planning to learn them in the future), and the "All Combos" is the tab which allows you to browse the database of combos.
The headers of the columns shown in the main screen are all properties which all combos would have. Properties of combos include: difficulty, damage, meter consumption/gain, name, type, favorite-d, and the combo itself. Ideally, this header row would be customizeable such that a user could determine which properties were most important to them and have them display accordingly. Clicking on a header would allow the user to sort the combos in that window by that header property (with an option for ascending or descending order as appropriate).
The left set of tabs deal only with which character's combos are being displayed at once. The bottom bar has a button which brings you to a new page dedicated to creating a new combo. The bottom bar also contains a search bar to search the entire combo database. Within the main window, a user may click on the row of a combo to be brought to a combo's page, which contains additional information about the combo and the demonstrative videos and discussion thread.
Additionally, we discussed the possibility that the user may not be able to see the entire combo sequence within the row on the main page, and that we may account for that by having a hover-preview feature, wherein hovering over a particular row in the table creates a hovering image of the full combo sequence.
Learnability:
While proper labeling and the affordances of tabs help learnability, there is a lot of functionality on one screen, which may overwhelm users and hinder learnability. The ability to customize headers for the table of combos and, even more importantly, the ability to order combos by a particular header, needs to be displayed in a particularly obvious way, as these features can greatly aid users in their combo browsing. The ability to click anywhere on the row in order to navigate to a particular combo's page would also need to be obvious via immediate feedback from hovering over a row in the table with the mouse. The combo creation page has many externally consistent widgets, and the combo page itself is simplistically laid out, so most learnability issues will spawn from the main page which handles the data organization.
Efficiency:
While a hindrance to learnability, having a lot of functionality in one place enhances the efficiency of this design. This design caters heavily to the more experienced players, who would be more likely to want to track combos that they like and combos that they plan to learn in the future. The ability to favorite combos makes such combos easily accessible from a user's Favorite tab. The ability to customize headers and sort by any given header makes it easy for users to scan data based on the combo properties that matter most to them. For the combo creaters, the "My Combos" tab allows them to find and edit the combos that they have submitted easily. If the combo creater would like to clarify something about his combo in the discussion forum, or upload a tutorial video about his combo, it is accomplished quickly in this interface.
Safety:
Navigational safety is particularly good, as most information can be found on one page, so there is no need to wait for an entire refresh for many browsing functions. Most utility is a maximum of two pages of navigation away.
Forum posts made by a user will be simple to edit and delete (i.e., your post will be added to the feed immediately, and hovering over your own post will offer these two options to you.)
A combo submission safety issue (that is present in all three designs) is how to treat incorrect combo submissions. User interviews revealed that the need to mark combos as "deprecated" was something that was lacking in current forums, but we have not decided how to distinguish "deprecated" combos from "wrong" combos. Should combos that have a discussion thread consisting entirely of "This combo is wrong/useless" posts be automatically deleted or merely marked as wrong? If it is marked, should the mark be distinguishable from the "deprecated" mark? These are questions that we will have to consider in whichever design we choose to move forward with.
Design 2
The second design, geared towards mobile devices or devices with smaller screens lends itself towards simplicity in casual browsing and addition of new combos. Upon entering the app, the user is immediately presented with the option of either browsing or editing combos (the two clear task choices of Combopedia). When choosing to enter a combo, the user enters in most of the details of that combo on one screen and is then taken to a separate screen to enter in the combo itself, as combo entry can be more complicated to communicate than a simple text field or drop down menu. When choosing to browse for combos, the search is filtered first by character and then by combo type. The user is led to a list of combos which can be selected individually for more details. The individual combo page contains most combo information, with links to a demonstrative video and a discussion page.
Learnability:
The streamlined design has very good learnability, as the user is only presented with a few, clearly labeled choices per screen. The app has many universal widgets, such as drop down menus, text entry fields, and touchable buttons that bring you to new pages of the app. Mobile and small screen interfaces force this implementation to remain a simple as possible, which means that the user is never overwhelmed by the functionality on any given page and can easily navigate to achieve his goals.
Efficiency:
The disadvantage of smaller screen sizes is that information must be spread out over multiple screens and the user's desired information may be a few screens away from their current one. As currently designed, if one were in the discussion page of a particular combo and then were reminded of a new combo that they wanted to enter into the system, they would have to traverse the page hierarchy back to the root (the home page) before reaching the page where they could submit a combo.
One way to streamline combo browsing that isn't shown in the diagram but would be part of this design is the addition of a search bar for combos on both the "Combo Type" page and the "Combo List" page. With this addition, the user wouldn't be forced to navigate to the "Combo List" page and then scroll for an indefinite amount of time to find a particular combo. If the user already had a search query in mind, he could simply perform such a search after choosing a character, which would cut down on navigation time.
Safety:
It is simple to correct navigational mistakes in this interface, as there will be a back button in the same place on every page. The highest safety risk is what will happen to user-submitted combos. The combo submission form will verify that all fields have been filled out, but we have not fully explored what will happen to the submitted combos in this design. We could allow the user who created the combo to delete it as they can delete their own forum posts (once finding it, being presented with the option to delete it via button touch.)
Design 3
While a conventional table of combos allows the user to sort through the the combo space based on a single variable, a user may face more complex, multi-variable considerations when searching for combos. The third design presents a more graphical method of filtering and navigating the combo space. The interface presents three panes: two columns for filtering, and a third larger viewing area. The left most column holds all of the variables of a combo, such as the character, combo type, difficulty, xp, etc. The middle column holds the corresponding constraint on that variable; for example, the user can limit the space of combos to a single character by clicking on the appropriate cell and bringing up a drop-down menu of the available characters. The viewing area displays a list of combos fitting the constraints.
When the number of unconstrained variables reaches two or less, the viewing area can be toggled into a 2D plot with points representing combos. The user can then consider the tradeoffs of certain variables - for example, difficulty versus effectiveness of the combo. Clicking on an existing point (or row in the list view) replaces the viewing area with a separate combo information interface that describes the combo, presents both the text and graphical view of the combo, and allows the user to post comments or view videos.
The user can create a new combo through a button in the list view or by clicking on the graph. Clicking on the graph creates a new combo with the variables set to the position of the click, although these can be changed numerically afterwards. The combo editing interface is similar to the one in Design 1.
Learnability:
Because the interface is not as conventional as a spreadsheet-like interface, the interface may be difficult to learn, especially depending on how the constraint setting specifically works. Adding widgets with affordances to the second column and making the points on the plot look clickable may make the interface more understandable. Because the variables will be fixed in place and listed horizontally in the first column, the user may have a clearer understanding of all of the constrainable variables than if they were listed in columns.
Efficiency:
For large complex sets of combo choices, a graphical display like a plot with multiple variables can be more efficient for picking the optimal choice than a simple list.
Safety:
The biggest error the user could make is accidentally creating a new combo by clicking on the plot; however this is easily fixed through a cancel button.