Case Study 1

Since most of the stuffs have been answered during class, I cannot help but having my thoughts stray to relate this case study to my latest assignment.

I think this case study should be presented before we start working on the assignments. I really like the lessons learnt (sorry I looked at the solutions :P) Many of them I kind of know intuitively and have applied them in the assignments. But I have not phrased them so nicely:
Lesson 1: Too many choices and aesthetics cause confusion:
I think web/ app design is steering more and more towards simplicity. Even for facebook, I rarely use or even bother to look at all the functions given there. Same applied for most of the websites.

Lesson 2: Users need guidance:
This is a great lesson. We should have more prompts for users in our assignment 2 application. I have started to hear from the users about being unclear on the intention of the application. We should have put some nice slogan next to love, me at least.
I have used the tactics of setting a clear number as a target for user. In my case, I asked my friends to help me send postcards to 3 other friends. However, it would have been integrate a prompt to encourage people to send postcards to friends right in the application.

Lesson 3: The Cold-Start Problem
We need early-adopters. That applies for all products I guess. In our case, it's very much us. I have also spotted friends who are most willing to help me send out postcards.


Just a few things that I want to add on the list of problems in the answer file:
1. Usability vs Aesthetics (Is the interface attractive? Is it functional?)
I really think color is very important. Because it's a contrasting color the most obvious things that I notice and very likly the thing that will direct my attention.
I wonder why the emoticons have not been made more obvious. Because if the intention of the developers is to direct the attention of the users to those emoticons (as said in the brief), they should have been made more obvious.

3. Cycle of interaction & incentives (Are the elements of the app engaging?)
I think the incentives in the game appeals the most to young users. However, I think for this app to make a difference in creating a habit of helping out other people, more thoughts should be paid to crafting the incentives. Also to make the action of helping out last, there must be some way to convert the extrinsic motivations (the incentives that is given to the user) to intrinsic motivation (the incentive that the user creates for himself/herself). But I'm really not sure how to do it since I'm pondering upon that for my other project as well.
Probably this app can be developed to be customized for an actual physical locus. Let say like to have a helping system within a HDB block/ within a school. That is if the app is intended to extend to all sorts of help/ favours. As it is said in the case, the help can be in terms of comments/ advices. If that is the products focus, then the app should be reshaped to focus on assisting that kind of help (may be in terms of easily categorize the comments/ advices etc.. the type of incentive may change also)