team-builder

Phase I: Analyzing Users, Competitors, and Initial Designs

Members: Nicholas Shaddox, Zane Gabor, and Fabian Garcia

Methods

We used Heuristic Evaluatons and Competitive Analysis during our research to better understand out user base.

Heurisic Evaluation

Demographics

This product could be used by higher education, specifically teachers looking to group students. it could also have applications in business, by helping group people of different disciplines together.

Competitive Analysis

Visibility of system status: 8/10

Discord is relatively transparent with its current system status. Every individual state the program can be in is accompanied by a unique window that displays what is happening i.e. updating or an announcement, along with a little blurb meant to humanize the platform. When everything is running correctly the standard home page is what’s displayed, showing whatever notifications you may have on top. There is no behind-the-scenes information, but I don’t think it’s something most people are interested in.
Discord uses great visualization since the main screen is almost all of what you need from the program itself. It uses Icons without words to save space. It also uses a left align design where an item (or icon) selected on the left updates the sections to the right of that section.
Discord does a good job of letting users know when there is a problem and most of the time the issues will resolve themselves

Match between system and the real world: 6/10

Discord doesn’t need to use a lot of words to communicate what each individual part of it is. When roaming the various IMs and servers, pretty much everything is user created, meaning both the text and the picture used for identification were placed there by the people who made it. Thus any identification issues aren’t really the fault of the discord platform.
Discord has been notoriously difficult to use for people in my friend group. I believe the layout is not intuitive and this leads to confusion. I believe if the design was mapped differently it would be more intuitive
This one is difficult to define the natural mapping because the UI in discord isn’t … natural. I assume that because the visibility of system status is so good that it makes it easy to learn.

User control and freedom: 8/10

Being a user-centered platform, almost everything on discord is customizable in some way shape, or form. User profiles can change their name, picture, and color associated with their text, server roles, the name of the server they’re a part of and the ability to set up any number of permissions for said created servers among many other features such as bots. Most limitations are user instated, but there are some, like in chat file sizes, that are locked behind a paywall.
Users are allowed a wide range of control over the app and feature, which provides ways to undo actions such as deleting messages or servers.
Discord has a clear exit button that clearly shows you how to exit a screen (usually a pop-up window). What is not clear, at least to me, is how to leave voice channels and group calls. It could do well to use the same system that the pop-up windows use.

Consistency and standards: 8/10

Discord has never had an update for the 5 or so years I’ve been using it that has majorly changed the user interface. Every boot-up greets me with the same expected screen every time.
Discord is very consistent and contains standard language and expressions.
system that I bothered using because everyone else was using it (for chat specifically). As for the voice system, I had used others and Discord seems to use a fairly common layout.

Error prevention: 8/10

The only error prevention I think I have actually interacted with on discord is the pop-up that warns users when they click a link to pretty much any website. It acts as a warning that the website that has been posted isn’t verified by discord and has the potential to do damage to your computer, so don’t click links from strangers. I guess the spoiler tag kind of counts here too. It fogs the posted text of the image to prevent users from seeing something they might not want to see yet. This feature is also available for graphic content of any kind, though it is user instated.
I believe that discord does this well as I have never experienced any errors using discord over a period of 5 years or so.
Many times I would click on a voice channel thinking it was a chat channel. When plugging in my headset and plugging them back in, I never know if I should change my settings. To clarify, It will ask if you want to change your settings when unplugging and plugging in.

Recognition rather than recall: 6/10

The interface is recognizable if you have used pretty much any other chat room. Actually using it to build a team would be a bit more of a process and would be specific user created.
There is a lot of memorization to be able to use the discord interface effectively.
Discords menu systems look to only go 3 layers deep and getting from one menu to another seems logical to me. Menu locations don’t change as you open other menus so it’s really consistent.

Flexibility and efficiency of use: 7/10

Most every function of discord is easy to access and use.
I believe this area is where discord falters a bit, it is not very flexible and its design makes things left inefficient.
Discord has a large variety of shortcuts in the form of keybinds. More than I thought could be possible. To me, 90% of them don’t seem practical to know or use but I’m not discord’s average user.

Aesthetic and minimalist design: 9/10

The design is really easy to interface with and you can swap between a light and a dark mode for an easier time reading.
Aesthetically I believe the design is clean and cool looking, but practically it is very confusing to new users.
Discord’s main homepage seems to be everything you need and most of it is commonly used. If they were to try and hide away some of the information that isn’t commonly used then it would be hidden in another menu layer.

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: 8/10

Most errors both occur and are recovered server-side on discord’s part. When the program goes down discord has what the problem is and the steps they are taking to fix it.
I feel like for the most part Discord handles errors for the user and allows easy recovery.
The only error I have found that is difficult to recover from (by myself) is rejoining a group after accidentally leaving it. There is a warning to help prevent the action but at that time it was the intention. I am sure there are other errors but there are many aspects of Discord that I haven’t (or can’t) use. Like the Nitro system.

Help and documentation: 6/10

When a new feature is introduced it’s accompanied by an announcement telling us it’s there and a small pictograph on how to use it.
I feel like the documentation and help for discord are a bit cumbersome to find and not as easily accessible as they should be.
Discord has extensive documentation but it seems catered to the ‘hardcore’ user rather than the average user since it is very verbose. There is also a very simple and quick guide when you first use the software.

Findings

From the information gathered in the Competitive Analysis, we discovered that there is a niche that is not considered by other competitors. The only real competitor to Team Builder is CATME which is a paid program that is exclusive to the web platform. One of the problems is that we are competing with some services that are commonplace among businesses and fairly high quality (aside from CATME which has an outdated UI that makes it feel old). As for the price, CATME is a subscription-based program which means that we can attempt to get into the free market.

As for the Heuristic Evaluation, we’ve identified a few key areas in which we could differentiate ourselves and Discord (chat application). Discord leans more toward recall rather than recognition. However, since there are many ways to get the same result it is almost not a negative point. Certain elements of the UI are difficult to navigate. The documentation is something else that we could possibly improve on. Discord’s documentation is mostly for the top 1% of users and involves complicated instructions. We could abstract that information to the more general user for our product.

Conclusion

Team Builder will be fairly unique since we can offer a combination of services (albeit, a simpler version) that pairs well with the task of streamlining the process of creating teams. Not only that but there is a market for this combination of services to be available on the web, mobile, and desktop. Since CATME, our main competitor, has a subscription service, it makes sense to provide our service free of cost so that we can compete.

The harder part is completing with services like google sheets, discord, slack, and so on. They are well-established services that many people are accustomed to using. Getting people to switch services, even when providing a unique take on it, is difficult since people tend to stick with what they know (unless they have a bad experience with it). We believe we can provide a fairly simple solution to the complicated task of automating team building.

Caveats

We could not come up with Caveats. The only limitation that is considered is time considerations. Testing the application could take more time than expected and could end up giving the go-ahead to a feature that has not fully been considered.