Mockup 6 Review

Continuing the review of the mockups for the Devcathlon, just like my previous blog, this time I will be reviewing the mockup from team 6.  The members of team 6 are Philip Lau, Dan Arakaki, and John Ancheta.  This team created two different versions of the mockups; one being taking the original mockups route and the other was incorporating the devcathlon game within the hackystat website.  For this review, I will be critiquing both versions of the mockup.

In their original mockup path, there was also not much difference with the layout of the pages compared to the previous mockup; although they did a good job of integrating the css, cascading style sheet, with the pages.  They did not waste any of the white spaces, aligning things horizontally.  Navigating through the site was not difficult also; it did not take to many clicks of the mouse to travel around the site. 

The sites logical structure seems to be well laid out.  All links leading to pages that they integrated into the site worked fine; but a link, in the profile page, directing to the achievement badges page bugged me.  There was a link for going to the list of badges, but just to keep in uniformity, comparing it to the link leading to the level page.  The team should have incorporated on the badge images; just like the image of the level displayed. 

 

There was one tab option that caught my eye, the game master tab.  As I proceeded to enter that page; my first that was, “Is this option only available to website administrator or can any user be a game master?”  As I thought to myself of a user becoming a game master, another thought entered.  What if the user that’s a game master decides to cheat and award people in his team badges, having them level up faster?  I guess these are questions the developers of the game must discuss.  Though, I would presume that there would be a set system for the distribution of levels and achievement badges.  That way no favoritism would affect the game. 

Proceeding to their next version, the one embedded into the hackystat site.  I can see they spent more of their development time with this version.  They took a whole different path to the advancement of the devcathlon game.  Instead of having a second top menu tab for devcathlon, they built-in a side panel, with some of the same options from the original.  Even though the pages did not look the same as their other mockup version, it did show a new lay out for the pages.  With this new lay out, it gave the whole class a preview of “What if we built the devcathlon game as an add-on to hackystat”. 

 

 Conclusion

I like the idea that this team brought to the class, giving us another version of the mockup.  Also the idea they used for the leveling system, basically they used the military ranking system.  Another part that I liked was the use of a slide bar, but they should have implemented an input box next to it.  That way the user can not only see the value the side bar distributing, but also for the user to enter a numeric input for precision.  In all, to me, this team did very well in creating two versions of a mockup, also in utilizing Yahoo’s user interface widget.