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Curious about what others have done after this summer internship, Paul now wants to read the 5 star reviews of the position. He clicks the 5-star node which brings up another modal dialog with all of the 5-star reviews listed and all of the fields he completed. He find's Tai Conley's review particularly relevant to his experience and wants to know more about him. Since Tai has marked his review as not anonymous and he is willing to be contacted about it, Paul clicks on Tai's name in the dialog. This launches Paul's favorite email application with a form email already composed stating the he held this position and would like to be contacted at his convenience. Paul makes some minor changes to make it more personal and then sends the email.
Comments on Usability
This design is intentionally overly simplistic, particularly in searching for positions. The filter box, while always available, simply serves to prune the tree at and beneath the current node. This is inherently different from global search and will need to be called out to the user in an effective way.
This design also segments the use of the application as a messaging client to a separate email client. This approach makes the design less usable as there are multiple places that you will have to look to find who you have contacted previously, but keeps searching for jobs and posting reviews about jobs as the primary focus.
The size change of the nodes in the review tree should give better visual feedback to the user than a mere number, however it may lose some points in learnability as the positions of the nodes may change with the number and distribution of the reviews received. There is also an opportunity for increased messaging by showing the rate at which a position's reviews are going up or down by changing the color to green for positive, grey for neutral and red for negative. This could indicate whether it was just one summer that was bad and they are improving as opposed to wide variance in reviews.
Minimalist Design
This sketch design is the “minimalist” approach for a UI of our idea. The main goal in designing it was to minimize the amount of effort needed for any one action the user would like to carry out. It also minimizes the amount of different pages and windows the user has to navigate through when doing these actions through the use of our "Nav-Bar" which will always be accessible (it scrolls with the scrollbar). Selections from the Nav-Bar will update the main window accordingly so that the user, in essence, never goes to a new webpage.
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