Thinking and Sketching

This week I have been trying to really sketch out what the mentoring interface looks like, specifically so that mentors can efficiently and productively collaborate on suggestions and rules. I did a lot of flow chart creating and sketches (though I unfortunately am unable to upload them due to some javascript misfortunes). 

One of the main questions I've had throughout this process is what information mentors need in order to collaboratively create, edit and eventually maintain really useful suggestions and rules. My current design only has information about when a suggestion/rule was last edited, the last author to edit and the textual description provided by the most recent author. Though I don't think mentors necessarily need to see the code for each previous revision, it might be useful to see the progression of the idea. However, the process already feels kind of complicated, so it makes me nervous to add information that might be extraneous and confusing. 

 Another piece I spent time thinking about was how to represent Looking Glass code changes, such as displaying a suggestion made by another mentor. I wanted it to be as space concious as possible, while still being clear. It might take less space to do some sort of highlighting or show where code has been inserted or deleted, but I came to the conclusion that none of these would allow the clarity of displaying both copies of the code and allowing the user to play both the original world and the world with the suggestion. I'm not actually sure that this design is technically possible at the moment, though, so I may need a plan b for this piece. 

I also took some time to consider whether the mentoring process can have a menu like Patrick designed, with a step-by-step progression. I decided to adapt this to a design that is more encouraging to go back and forth between steps if necessary and also allows for more than one path through the system. I want mentors run the tests and if they aren't right, feel encouraged to go back to the last step to improve their own rule. I also want mentors to participate both in the mentoring of the child they know, as well as in collaboration to improve one or more other mentor's worlds. While doing this, I still tried to keep part of the idea of showing the mentor multiple steps in the process at a time so they know what they left to do.