GetHelp?

Its been a week or two since I last blogged, being bogged down by the final project(YES, the final project), NM3216, and various other modules I lagging behind in(read: all other modules).

So then only an hour ago when yecheng asked me if I've written my case study on gethelp, did I realize I actually have more work from cs3216 than I could imagine.

So onto getHelp, my first impression after reading through the case study is that its really similar to spreadem, the facebook app I built for the the first assignment. The first thing that comes to mind is the profile page. The aim of the app is for the user to come back as often as possible, and placing the "new projects" page at the start of the page will encourage users to only come whenever they have a need, and not to come on every now and then to view new 'gethelp' requests.

The next issue I see is in overviews page, like I said, this should be the first page users see each time they log on. Also, by placing award receivers on the overviews page, there's a risk that it gets clogged up by receivers, thereby masking out the help requests.

When creating a new project, the "call for help" button is situated in the top right hand side, by the form. In this case, it is not intuitive to have the textbox there because in most cases users will want to add more details with regards to what they need. This page should be modified so that the "call for help" button is after all the options, so that the user can at least make sure he didn't miss out anything.

In the individual needs page, the layout makes it rather casual, most users who are looking for help should be rather urgent or serious, yet the layout doesn't reflect how desperate they are, nor are there enough space for users to give more details, suppose I need to learn how to build a server that supports 200 people for a multiplayer game(I actually do), I will need to give way more information than the space actually allows.

Next, the referral system, this, I'm guessing, will allow users that can see the project and send referrals to others. However, this is limiting the possibilities for collaboration, suppose I get a request for help, one that I cannot assist with. Now it should be obvious that I will want to refer someone else. But with 4-500 friends it can be REALLY hard to know what EVERYONE is good with. It will be much much more efficient so send that request to everyone, and even if they don't know how to help, they can FURTHER pass down the request to all their friends.

UI wise, at the bottom of the new projects page, there's a list of SQL code which really isn't supposed to be there, should be some weird bug or just for testing purposes. Also, the slanted icons look nice, but the texts should be horizontal at least, increase with the readability.The helpers and probables should be collapsable, since the list might be very long if the project is rather popular.

Lastly, to really maximize facebook, users should have the opportunity to view all the (unresolved)requests and help people that he didn't in the first place. Hence, in the overviews page, there should be a "view latest" which shows all the new requests provided by ALL the users, instead just that of his friends. By association there should also be a search so users can look for similar help requests or just to look for something within his expertise so he can continue gaining badges.