The unlikely brainchild of guitar hero Stuart Bull (LickLibrary.com), BetweenTheCheats was to be the first of its kind... an online community of users sharing tales of grief, solace, triumph and healing over relationship challenges via video upload; it was a member-based friendly-shoulder version of YouTube. For greater emotional problems, a team of psychiatric professionals would offer counseling via Skype or a propriety variant that was to be developed.

 

Stuart ran into trouble recruiting professionals for online counseling, partially due to a lack of vision on their parts, and partially due to inter-state licensing problems. The site languished after I had completed all of the design and development.

 

Ironically, online counseling is recently in the news as the next great idea as entrepreneurs quest to turn the idea of a fully-interactive user experience into a reality.

 

The interface design for BetweenTheCheats was created with two directives in mind... simplicity for the over-wrought user and richness of content for the self-help individualist. These two compatible paths were best accomplished with a horizontal main navigation design and subsequent vertical sectional navigation allowing the user to drill down thru a series of filters, ultimately finding multimedia content for whatever general or specific topic they were searching.

 

I did some usability interviews (generously called ethnographic studies in this case) with a few psychologyical professionals, so that the interface would be equally useful and intuitive from the provider end of the spectrum.

 

Toolkit: wireframing, prototyping, Adobe Photoshop, PageSpinner, HTML, CSS.