Making Helping Easier
By: Hyun Jay Yang
Tags: Helping Others, UX

Is It Perfect?

For those who have read up to this point of this blog, we sincerely congratulate you! That being said, you probably have seen some glaring issues with our application design, and it has become abundantly clear to us as well once we started the evaluations of our design. However, we would like to think of these evaluations more as “points to improve” rather than “things we did bad” in our application design. We used SaiChandan Duggirala’s “10 Usability Heuristics with Examples” and CTD’s “Accessibility is More Than a Checklist” to check how our application holds up. So without further ado, here are just some of the ways we could improve our application in terms of human computer interaction drastically.

The Heuristic Evaluation

Visibility of System Status:

While Nextdoor has its own implementation of a placeholder icon when images or other contents take a long time to load, our prototype does not show or represent what would occur if an issue were to occur with loading speeds. The Nextdoor progress bar when transitioning and loading pages is good, but the individual loading of items can be improved to something more than just empty gray boxes. Perhaps, following Nextdoor’s logo, we could implement a house with a smoking chimney to represent the “still loading” stage of the individual items.

Match between System and the Real World:

Our implementation of our functions may be solid, but the button texts may be misleading or unclear for some of our users. We could improve this by replacing the texts with more every day words rather than the current technical jargon. For example, instead of the ambiguous “Recommend”, we could go for a more casual and friendly tone by saying “Introduce to a Friend”.

User Control and Freedom:

We were trying to make our functionalities as simple as possible, but this sacrificed some user control over the application. For example, we don’t have a cancel button when a user accidentally signs up for a volunteering activity and that is definitely something we can improve on.

Consistency and Standards:

The whole app follows the same layout and structure within different functionalities. The Theme color also aligns with the one used in NextDoor which makes the whole plugin features consistent with the original NextDoor design. Also, different features use the same icons making the app more consistent.

Error Prevention:

Simply put, our implementation currently does not have any form of error prevention, such as spell check, or user input validation. We simply assumed that the user would be the perfect user who never failed to put in the correct answer or input when using our application. For the most part, our application only has choices that the user makes by pressing one of several options, but we give free reign when users input text. We could implement a spell checker and give possible suggestions when users are specifically typing, and would help with the overall user experience.

Recognition rather than Recall:

Currently, we don’t have a recognition mechanism in our system. Considering our app is simple enough, a recognition mechanism is not a dire need. One thing we can think of is to add a history section in the ‘ask for help’ page to help users memorize the people that have helped them before.

Flexibility and Efficiency of Use:

For different kinds of users, usually people who need help and people who want to offer help, we are providing a good experience for both types of users. For people who need help, they can get access to a lot of resources and information in the app. For people who want to help, we are assuming that we can use Nextdoor’s interface to add content to the system, which is an efficient solution.

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design:

We’re no artist, but for the most part we feel that for once we were able to achieve somewhat of a minimalist design! Sure, maybe it’s not the prettiest thing you’ve seen, but hey, there doesn’t seem to be any unnecessary images or buttons, don’t you think?

Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors:

As mentioned in #5 — Error Prevention, we did not consider users actually inputting invalid forms of data. Since our application is designed mainly for the mobile platform, if a user were to input and submit wrong data that the application can detect, it would be nice for the mobile app to scroll to where the invalid field was inputted, and an alert feature that describes the error and how to fix it. For example, if a user inputted a non-numeric set of characters when trying to donate, the alert would pop up to tell the user, “Uh oh! It seems that we can’t tell how much you are trying to donate. Remember to use numbers only!”

Help Documentation:

We are taking the assumption that NextDoor has its own customer service and maintains all other documents. However, for our emergency features, we still need to add corresponding help and documents for customers navigating our app.

The Accessibility Evaluation

Auditory

Our application does not use any form of sound to interact with the user, so having hearing impairment does not degrade the user’s experience in any way! That being said, any future implementation of sounds should definitely take into account whether or not it would take away from the users that cannot rely on sound, and find alternative ways to give cues to that particular audience.

Visual

Our app has a friendly interface for people who have visual impairment. The interface is using high contrast color to make it clean and easier for low vision people to read. And the colors in the app don’t have meaning other than build up the theme. That’s being said, people with color blindness will have no problem using our app. For people that are completely blind, they can use our app with the assistance of the built-in voice over function of their mobile phone.

Cognitive and Neurological

The main components in our app are static images. We try not to include much text so that we can attract and retain more users using our app. Also, that means our customers won’t have trouble encountering any moving and flashing elements. All icons and buttons we have are straightforward and self explanatory. We don’t include any time limited task on our app so people won’t find it difficult to navigate between features. Overall, our app is friendly to people with cognitive or neurological issues.

Speech

Our app does not have any form of speech interaction required. Perhaps the only place that someone might “expect” speech is if someone wanted to directly call another neighbor, but this can easily be overcome through the texting capabilities.

Physical

Unfortunately, not having any speech recognition means that our main and only form of interaction with the app is using physical interactions. This makes it impossible for those who physically cannot use the phone to interact with the app at its current state. We most definitely will consider how we can include such a user base to be able to interact with our app. Voice recognition is definitely one way we could approach this problem, but further research is definitely necessary.