This bulletin board is very interesting and complex. It may be appropriate for the courses section of the SIMians bulletin board. The focus of the bulletin board is news items that have been submitted by the users of Plastic. An editor at Plastic then decides whether a submitted item is worthy of posting. Users then post comments relating to the news stories that have been posted. Moderators can rank the quality of the comments. Users can then filter out messages that have received low rankings.

Pros:

• The structure is appropriate for a bulletin board where comments are requested regarding a particular subject. If it were used for the course section, someone like Ed could first read a description of the course and then immediately review comments that have been posted regarding the course.
• It is easy to follow the threaded messages. It is easy to distinguish one thread from another. It is easy to distinguish whether a comment is in response to the news story or in response to another comment.
• Users can search either individual message threads or the entire site.
• The news stories and their corresponding comments are arranged into different sections. This might be a good model to follow for the course section of the SIMians discussion site since users will probably be interested in browsing through different categories of classes rather than all classes at once.

Cons:

• This is not the appropriate information architecture for certain parts of the SIMians site (e.g., the job section) since these parts will be driven by messages sent by people either requesting or providing information rather than by blurbs of information.
• The ranking system may be complex for the SIMians site. There will probably not be enough messages posted in order to warrant filtering of the messages.
• I think that their registration system is overly complex. The link to the registration form is buried in the middle of the homepage. It also does not allow the user to pick out his own password but instead e-mails a password to the user. The user must then get the e-mail message, write down the password and go back to the Plastic site to log in. I also thought the registration process required too much personal information from the user (i.e., gender and date of birth).

Figure 1

 

Figure 2

 

Figure 3

---

Last Modified: Feb-19-2001

Copyright 2001: Linda Duffy, Jean-Anne Fitzpatrick, Sonia Klemperer-Johnson, James Reffell