This is a review of mockup4 the team Anthony Du, John Ly, and Robin Raqueno who did some cool things with their portion of the user interface for Devcathlon.
The Mockup
It looks like all of the teams chose the current look of the webpage. The design is similar to the player profile page for XBox's online system.
The user should have no problem navigating around mockup4's system. There are tabs that link all the pages together so there is no need to hit the back button.
One issue I have is with some of the navigation tabs like the My Profile tab which also contains a drop down menu. I understand the placement of the menu because Edit Profile, My Teams, My Matches fall into the My Profile category. However, the combination of a navigation tab and drop down list may confuse the user. One possible solution would be to create another tab/menu.
Team Mockup4 did a really nice job with some of
the additional features with their design. However, certain features may not be intuitive and will probably require a user to go searching for a desired task or information.
For example the My Teams page serves as a listing that points out which teams the player is participating in, listing teammates, team name, and scores. Team mockup4 added a nice feature where a user clicks on the gray bar and reveals the team's information.
Overall mockup4 makes decent use of screen space although the player profile page requires 3 clicks to reach the end of the page. After reviewing all the mockups it seems no one made changes to the profile page and maybe eliminated as we enter the build phase. The architecture laid out by mockup4 makes sense and is intuitive however, the system was borrowed from mockup2 so the layout was already in place. None of the input mechanisms work, nothing happens to data after typing it in and submitting. However, none of the other mockups had working input forms.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The badge system was well thought out it uses a point scoring system to award players. I especially the Larry O'Brien trophy from the NBA. I think most players of Devcathlon will identify with the badges. With mockup4 new badges will not be displayed until a player has enough points to earn the achievement.
I thought the drop down menus for team pages was cool and a nice way to present the information. I would like to see an icon that points out the menu drops down. Because in its current state the reveal is not intuitive.
Mockup4's architecture is well laid out all of the links are organized. I think we should go ahead, use their design, and add the other pieces to their system.
Certain pages like the team information page could use more information to guide the user.
The level hierarchy page needs a little information however, I doubt we will implement the level system into Devcathlon. Because there is a sensitivity issue with the design and it maybe insulting to other professions.
The My Profile navigation tab needs to broken up because it seems confusing in my opinion. It could cause a user to miss click and navigate to the wrong page.
Conclusion
Anthony Du, John Ly, and Robin Raqueno did nice work on mockup4. The team should go and implement mockup4's badge system and drop down menu for the team information. In fact we should figure out what other pages could use a reveal.
