Badges Info Page - Take Two

This week is all about iteration two of the badges info page.



Several notes about this version:

Stars
    The stars on the side indicate the level. If they are filled in, that means the user has achieved that level.

Resource World
    Although the polaroid-esq animation is fun, I think for now we will stick with the YouTube-esq scroll bar.  There is no compelling motivation for the former and we already have the latter on the site. Maybe if we have time later, it would be a fun addition to add.


“Recommended for you”

Jordana and I talked a little bit about how to convey to the user that the badges page she has found herself on is or is not recommended to her. The problem with the previous design with the suggestion tree on the bottom of the page is that the user may get all the way through the page before realizing this badge isn’t relevant to her.

I’m not a big fan of the giant word, “recommended” pasted up top, so I initially played around with having “locked” and “unlocked” icons next to the name. However, Jordana and I talked about how things like “locked” and “not recommended” goes against the original vision of badges as a flexible suggestion system that we encourage, but do not mandate, users to follow.

Instead, I decided to be a little more subtle. The recommended levels will be colored and the non-recommended levels will be greyscale. The recommended pages will have some sort of indication that the user should pursue that badge, while the not-recommended pages will just be blank. Hopefully, the user will get the idea without having a “No” shoved in their face.

However, I’m still stuck with the kind of cheesy “recommended” icon. Any vocab or design suggestions?

Skill designs

The skills are pretty much broken down into categories: functions, action order boxes, drop downs, procedures, scene, not correlated with the IDE. Each one of these will be colored/reminiscent of how it looks in the IDE (if applicable). Hopefully, these visual cues will lead the user to the badge

Mini badges for skills

The general consensus at the meeting was pro-mini badges. Caitlin brought up a good point that the feedback should help the user figure out what skills she still has to achieve in order to fulfill that badge. Moreover, we can also use grey circles with colored ribbons to indicate that the user has remixed the skill.

The mini-badges could also potentially solve the, “Why haven’t I earned this darn badge yet?!?!?!?” problem. However, a lot of badge levels build on the skills in the previous level. How should we treat these skills? For instance, a user has earned a bronze Animating Characters, should the “get a part” skill and the “roll” skill on the subsequent levels have mini badges? Arguably, it would be more useful to the user to not count the skills that already count toward a badge. That way, they could have an accurate depiction of what they still need to do. However, would the user be confused as to why it looks like she doesn’t have any worlds with those skills or do you think she will understand that they don’t “count?”

Another thing to consider is that if we ever get the point in which users can modify/edit existing worlds, should they be allowed to build on a previous badge-earning world to earn the next badge? If the answer is yes, then that would indicate that the user gets a mini badge on all skills that she has earned regardless if that skill was already used in a badge-earning world.

When you click on a skill, a lightbox will appear giving visual breadcrumbs, a simple description of the skill and your/other worlds with that skill. That latter should also help with the “Does my world have this skill?” problem.

Recap:

Any suggestions for the “Recommended for you” space?

Thoughts when to stick mini-badges to skills?