This week the class was given the difficult task of critiquing the mockups of the Devcathlon game the other teams created, along with my team’s mockup as well. I will be looking at mockup 5; the team consists of Aric West, John Zhou, and Scheller Sanchez.
When I first entered their mockup site, opening into the homepage, there was not so much different from the previous mockup done earlier in the semester. It was the same page layout when a user first enters; having all the functions in the opening page, after signing in. The logical structure of the site was also the same as before, all pages leading to where they were linked to previously.
Proceeding to the profile page, I initially noticed that the team did not utilize the use of css, cascading style sheet, in organizing the layout of the page. The tables of the page lead downward, which increase the size of the page. Having the page gain in size, would force the user to scroll up and down to view the information in the page. They left a lot of unused white spaces to the right of the profile page. With the using css they could have brought table that were at the bottom, up to occupy the unused white spaces.
Looking at the page consistency, it looks like the layout is constant. All items implemented into the page, aligns to the left of the page; but again it increases or may increase the size of the page. Another consistency problem I saw was linking the list of achievement badges page. Nothing was wrong with the linking, but they only had one link. This link was located at the top of the page, on the drop down menu bar of the page. They could also link the achievement badges page to the profile page, having a hyper link when a user clicks on a badge image. Also when I went to another page, at the top drop down menu, the link for the achievement badge page was gone.
One idea I find difficult to comprehend was in the profile page. In the section next to the user’s picture, there are two labels, rank and level. What does rank or level reflect? Does rank indicate the progress of the user in the game? Or does it reflect on the user’s progress compared to his team, possibly making him the highest rank; thus, making him the leader of the team. This could lead to some level of confusion to users when wanting to know their advancement in the game.
The one thing I found very well thought out about this mockup was the idea of comparing badges to another user. When the current user browses to another user’s page, the current user has the ability to compare his or her badges to that other user. To me, this would bring more competition spirit to the game. After all what’s a game with out a challenge. Another part I found good about this mockup, was having a progress bar in the list of achievements. This would help a user keep track on how much more points needed to achieve a certain badge.
Conclusion
The mockup from team 5 didn’t have too many differences from an earlier mockup developed by team 2; though, team 5 did add new ideas to the mockup. To me this team didn’t take to much time to readjust the layout, but to mainly think of new ideas for the game; the level system, badges, and events. I did not expect any “wow” type of new interface, since none of the programmers from the team are web developers; but I did expect new ideas for the game. I feel that this team brought some good new ideas to the game and especially a new way of encouraging the spirit of competition for the game.
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