Opera Unite

Hey all Unite people!

I'm Anders Sjögren and I am an Interaction Designer working with Unite and also one of the judges of the weekly competitions (be very afraid!).

I thought it would be a good idea to post some UX guidelines, and things that I look for when judging the applications, to help you win the competition!

Okay, here goes:

Make sure the application has a use-case
When you are thinking about developing an application, think of the scenarios in which the application is going to be used in. Imagine yourself using the application in these scenarios. Also, some questions to think about could be: What is the purpose of the application? What service will this application provide? What problem is it trying to solve? What are the use-cases of the application? In what context is it going to be used (home/work/school/mobile/tv)?

Display the username and photo of the host of the application in the UI
Since the application is going to look the same on all hosts (if no customization is available in the application which would bring huge bonus points from me ), it is important that the visitor can see who is hosting the application from the UI. Otherwise, the only way for the visitor to know who is hosting the applications is through looking at the username in the Web address.

To display the photo of the host, use this API: http://my.opera.com/{username}/picture.pl?xscale={number} and replace username and number with proper values (e.g. sjogren, 100, and dont' forget to remove the curly braces ).

Provide a link to the host's Unite Home
If the visitor is interested in the other applications the host is running, he/she has to go to the host's Unite Home where the list of the running applications is shown.

Make the UI work on different resolutions and browsers
People have different monitors with different resolutions, make sure to support at least 1024x768. Debug your application by testing it in different browsers since we all prefer different browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer). If you'd like to pimp your UI, there are good JavaScript frameworks out there to help you.

Tips

• Get feedback from your friends about your application
• Test the application with friends
• Ask people about ideas or improvements that could be useful

That's it for now and good luck in the competition everybody!
Battle for the best Opera Unite applications

Resources:
Ten Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen
Usability - Wikipedia