UX Teardown of Webuild.sg
I’m doing a 3 article series of UX teardowns of sites and apps I like, and providing possible solutions to issues I see.
Each article will cover 3–5 major points and solutions — comments are welcome!
Click to jump to the other two articles: StoryCollider|Slack
Webuild.sg
Webuild is a site meant for local developers, makers, and designers to find events to go to, and free and open sourced projects to contribute to. It seeks to encourage people to interact and be active in the maker and tech community.
Personally, I only use it to find events to go to. Anything to do with science, technology, and maker events will interest me, and webuild is the only site that curates events weekly according to these filters.
Issue 1: Misleading Event Heading
At first glance, it works very well for my needs. The list of events is updated and available on the homepage, which makes it extremely convenient to refer to.
However, I quickly learnt that some interesting and relevant tech events are not listed here, as opposed to other sites such as thelist and meetup.com
After talking to the creators of the site, I realised that the events that are listed are only those which are free and open to all.
This isn’t made clear in the site, so I was confused.
Solution: Having a more descriptive title for the events list might help clarify this to users.
Issue 2: Difficulty with Calendar adding
The site also offers an option for users to add the generated calendar to their google or iphone calendar:
However, as I was unfamiliar with the process, this is what happened when I tried to install it:
Hence, I stopped trying as I was very frustrated by the error message.
Solution: I will suggest having a need help? link at the end of the URL.
This help link will lead to a short tutorial with a gif like this:
to help newbies like me understand how to add this calendar to their own.
Issue 3: Unclear Project Heading
The site creators also shared with me that the open source list of projects is refreshed daily, according to how many commits a project has, how popular it is, and how active it is.
As these are important factors for a developer to consider when choosing a free and open sourced project to contribute to, I feel that the information should be visible on the site itself.
Solution: Rename heading and added description about how the projects are filtered by:
Issue 4: Site Goals are unclear
Webuild also has a very exciting podcast feature which collects interviews and talks from notable makers and developers in the community. However, this is not visible from their homepage and difficult to find.
The creator’s goals of encouraging the community to network, contribute, and level up were not clear from the main page too.
Solution: Reframe the site to emphasize its goals, and showcase the podcasts prominently on the site:
Conclusion
That’s not all of it! Webuild is such a cool site with lots of great features, that I will be doing a more in-depth post on it with videos. Stay tuned!
Its also an open sourced project, so anyone can contribute to improve it. I definitely will be contributing to its UX research after being inspired by Victoria Bondarchuk’s talk at FOSSASIA 2016!
Any thoughts on the difficulties UX designers face in contributing to open-sourced projects? Would love to hear it in your comments below!
Click to jump to the other two articles: StoryCollider|Slack
