Notes on Get Help

This is a case study for, err, credit. My thoughts:

The Idea
Is a help app necessary? I think the app's cute. That said, I also think that people already post shout-outs and help-me!s through their Facebook feeds, the same way that I would ask for help on Twitter when I'm stuck on a project (or pissed off at Vim). This makes sense, since Facebook's status messages are modeled around Twitter's short-message/wide-community format, and Twitter itself is a remarkably useful place to look for help.

Are badges the right kind of incentive in a help app? If you really think about it, what you're doing by implementing a badge/reward function is that you're replacing a moral incentive (the afterglow from altruism, in this particular case) with an inferior 'status' incentive (virtual rewards and badges and rankings within the app). I'm not sure if this presents itself as a problem to getting help within Get Help, but - generally speaking - incentives are a very tricky economic game to get right.

The Main Page
Options are too wordy. Users don't read options beyond the first two words; options should be shorter.

Remove details. There are too many options available to a person wanting to post a call for help. Most of these data fields are simply unnecessary. Tags are unneeded, deadlines can be incorporated into the main post-field, estimated time, location and description are all overkill to the simple post mechanism.

Inconsistent typography. Pet peeve of mine, but why are a) the fonts in grey, and b) the fonts italicized? From experience, a single web page should have no more than two fonts (one, in this case, since you are limited by Facebook - which has its own set of fonts).

The Overview Page
Remove red buttons. The buttons are too big. And too red. Get rid of them, or change them to something befitting of Facebook's design.

Referrals should be sticky If someone is referred to you, it would make sense to have these referrals stick to the top of the notifications area. I would also suggest some styling to differentiate a referral from a normal post.

Individual Help Pages
Remove 'wish her luck'. If a person wishes to wish someone else good luck, they can very well comment on the call to help. There is no need to code an extra features that does this for them.

Is overdesigned. Is adding a sidebar necessary? It is perfectly adequate to display the help requirement (with icon or whatnot) and comments, with a small display panel of the 'probables' and 'helpers'. There's too much going on on the page at the moment.

In Closing
I read Adhiraj's blog post on Get Help, and I must agree with him that it's really quite something to have your app ripped apart by 40+ students. What a, err, privilege! That's all for now, folks, back to work.