Usability Evaluation Of An Interactive System For Movie Store Ecommerce Application

This assignment is designed to provide practical experience of carrying out an analysis of usability requirements and priorities, performing a systematic usability evaluation using a standard method, and producing a presentation reporting the findings.

Your firm of interaction design consultants is trying to build up a portfolio of impressive work, to enable it to pitch for business convincingly in the future.Your task is to produce a usability evaluation of an interactive system, plus a presentation of your results. You have a completely free choice of what interactive system you evaluate, except that it must not be one that you have evaluated for a previous assignment.

You may get people to help you with tasks that are easier or better done by more than one person, but you need to be very clear about what you did and what others did.

Use Case for Movie Store Ecommerce Application

Human computer interaction is an extensive topic and it needs to be handled carefully adhering to all the principles and concepts that surrounds it. Human factors that are applicable while designing a website or a mobile application must be put in to consideration to avoid loss of customers or clients. The loss of clients and customers may have otherwise occurred due to poorly designed websites that are not user friendly enough. Some of the factors that will be considered while doing an evaluation in the system design include the content, visibility, clarity, alignment and the navigation process across the different pages that would be available in the system (Nielsen 2013).

In this case study, the major evaluation procedure will be on the use of online store for selling movies, which is an ecommerce website that is known for selling Television sets, music, sport and other entertainment related offers. This ecommerce website has been offering provisions for all the platforms found online for the clients and customers, who would like to access movie stores online and would be able to buy and access the products that are available and the ones that fulfill their requirements (Dabrowski 2014). Customers, who are accessing the movie store application, will be viewing an assortment of collections from the most popular ones to the least popular ones. For this purpose, a customer or user has to register with the application first and then they would be able to view the contents of the application.

This ecommerce website would be acting as an interface or a bridge between the customers, clients and viewers with the company. This would work as an advantage for boosting the market for the company, thus it would enable the company to increase the number of sales as well as reach out to the existing and potential customers. The ecommerce application has two distinct development ends, namely the front-end for the customers and the back-end for the administrator who would manages the website and the sales.

The back-end development allows the company owning the ecommerce application for uploading images of their products, managing the User Interface for the customers and viewers, including the coordination and management of the orders by the customers holding a legitimate registration in the application. The other end is the front-end, where the clients interact with the movie ecommerce application forming the User Interface where the customers can view, select and place an order with the company.

This report thus aims at analyzing all the features of usability test of the front-end of the system, that is, the customer side of the ecommerce system. The research is to bring about the capabilities and the major functionalities of the ecommerce application and this will indeed help in the creation of tasks that are to be performed by several selected users or participants. The results will be based on the principles of the heuristics of usability test by Nielsen Jacob.

The result will be based on the features of the application like visibility, efficiency, ease of use of the system and the navigation and how consistent and the corresponding is the content of the application. On the basis of the feedbacks provided by the participants evaluating the Heuristics, the report will be used in providing recommendations for helping the organization in improving the usability of the ecommerce application system for the movie store.

Use Case for Movie Store Ecommerce Application

The movie store ecommerce website has been able to provide ways through which the application can be used in boosting of sales of orders. Some of the most important functionalities that are provided by the movie store website are the customer login with an attached link for customer registration, the view tab for the collections of products, the provision of selecting the product after viewing and lastly making an order after placing the selected products in the carts for shopping. In the movie store ecommerce system a user can also create of wish lists and also the gift cards for the loved ones (Bravo 2017).

Movie store ecommerce system has provided a detailed description of all the products that are available in the store, this has enabled the customers to understand the details of any given product even before they decide whether to buy it or not. In the ecommerce application for any placed order to be termed as successful, the customer submitting the request of placing an order must be logged in the system and this through his or her account known as the myAccount. In the my Account section, customers are able to keep tracks of the status of their commands, view the history of any concluded earlier placed orders, add, edit or even eliminate their address book, update the details of their accounts and lastly they would be able to view the Webpage they had recently visited in the ecommerce application.

The payment modes or options that the customers can apply while paying for the place products are such as debits cards, credit cards, checks and the use of PayPal services. To apply any method of payment a user must place a specific order and chose the convenient payment method from the one provided. The following use case diagram illustrates the customer’s interaction with the Movie Store Ecommerce system.

As seen in the use case diagram of Movie Store Ecommerce Application system, it will be evident to say that the customers accessing the website can navigate across the different Webpage of the ecommerce website, and also they will be able to perform various tasks, which may require a lot of time to interact with the available functionalities. This will require a step by step functionality when evaluating the functions important to the movie store system. The report is required to look on the above functionalities as they are explained in the use case diagram. Some of the usability features that need to be analyzed match the functionalities, such as the gift card creation, customer registration, customer logins, screening of the products, adding up items to the shopping cart and enabling customers to view their account details.

Evaluation methodology

The investigation contained a total of 12 users who had never used the Movie Store Ecommerce application previously. The twelve participants were chosen on the basis of gender equality and they were considered on the basis of their computer literacy. For easy analysis of the usability features the primary data collection methods, were observations and questionnaires were used. The methodology evaluation was on the basis on the following steps:

• Each and every participant was supposed to have at least 1 hour where fifty minutes was for the test and 10 minutes were for the filling of the questionnaire.
• While doing the execution, the researcher was able to observe and analyze all the gestures and all the reactions of the users or the selected participants while navigating across different webpage in the Movie Store Ecommerce Website.
• The observation assisted the researcher in knowing what it feels to have the firsthand feeling of the website when you are expecting from the production of the application to be commissioned.
• The steps below illustrate the way the evaluation we done when interacting with the Movie Store Ecommerce application system.

Step One

Each and every participant was supposed to visit the movie store with the URL www.moviestore.com. In this section they are supposed to create an account by filling all the details as provided in the text fields labeled. If one user is successfully registered, then the participants would be allowed to login to the webpage and hence would be able to access the account by login details they used while registering to the application.

Step Two

After the successful login in the user account, each participant was required to use the menu in the side bar that consisted of various links that are used to represent the several categories offered by Movie Store Application System. The users were obligated to access each and every category by viewing the products and at least record two items from all viewed categories.

Step Three

In scenario three, all the participants were supposed to select latest additions and the top one hundred pictures or images from the list in the categories and add at least two items to shopping cart. In addition, they were to check if they are able to access the posters of movies by a click and collectibles and if they can add at least two items from both the categories in their chosen wish list.

Step Four

After successfully adding the items to the cart for shopping, it was to be checked if the steps that were followed for placing an order by checking out with the use of the means provided for payments such as the PayPal, debit card etc. which was dependence on the choice of the participant, was working or not.

Step Five

In scenario five, the participants were supposed to create a gift card for their friends by visiting the webpage and providing with all the details of their friends to receive the gift and then submit the gift cards.

Step Six

This was the last task and the participants were supposed to access their MyAccount and view all the status of their current orders, all the orders completed, their address book, the details of the wish list and the items that had been recently checked.

As seen in all the above steps or walkthroughs it could have been said that they acted as the guidance to help the participants when interacting with the system. By following the six steps it may become easy to analyze the capability of each and every participant when interacting with the system as it is an online application platform conducting their activities (Nazim Habibov Assistant Professors of Social Work 2010). After performing all the above activities, all the participants were required to fill the questionnaires provided, which would help the researchers in providing recommendations regarding the improvements needed in the website. This will help in improving the quality of the service delivery for the website.

The methodology of evaluation that was provided, offered provision for visible and clear understanding of the system as it looks at various features of usability, which includes the design consistency, information clarity as it is seen in the application, ease of navigation across the website, an ease of use using various features of the available applications, the website visibility in terms of all features of usability features and the efficiency of the website (Bias 2009). The stated features are very necessary considering the factors of human interactions with the systems and the relation of the webpage with the real world while performing various functions that are provided by the website.

The questionnaire structure that was applied was both open and close-ended questionnaires.  This approach has helped users in giving out their views in a manner that is very open, where they were not limited in any way when giving out their suggestions. The feedback provided by the participant’s were genuine as it was well captured and that nothing was withheld which in turn ensures that the users received quality usability of information for the process of evaluation methodology.

Results of Evaluation

The following are some of the results that were founded from the evaluation, analysis and the filling of the questionnaires. The result was made on the basis of the evaluators participating in the usability test of the Movie Ecommerce application and the feedback provided by them while filling the questionnaire. The following section from step one to six will provide an in-depth result for all the steps and how the participants interacted with the Movie Ecommerce Website Application.

Step One Results

The main reason for this task was evaluating the process of how customers can register to the Movie Ecommerce Application and the way the account can be accessible to them. The observation during this step shows that almost all the participants were able to carry out the task of creating an account and login in to the system. This means that they were able to provide email addresses and passwords when they logged in after registration. The login credentials were to be used in identifying the unique identity of the customer and also during shipping according to the choices of the customers. There were no major challenges reported in this step from the moment they were doing creation to logging in.

indicating all the links locations it becomes easy for the participants for creating account and Logging in to the website. This helped them as the two functionalities were well structured, making it easy to join the membership of the Ecommerce Company making the interactive platform very easy and very effective when using it.

Step two Results

The main aim of this step was to test the capabilities of the user by navigating across the various categories, where they used the sidebar category links as shown in the screenshot below:

From the given links, the evaluators were able to steer across through the specific categories. They were also enabled to select at least two items from the given category using the descriptions of the detailed products. Using the response given by the participants, users understood all the links clearly and they were able to use the search feature to search items on the based category. See the figure below for the given explanation of accessing a movie poster:

In this category, all the participants selected the movie from the dropdown list and were able to view their selected movie posters such as the originals, reprints, personality-based movies, collectives and British quads as seen in the interface shown above. The above feature has been made easy by giving a feature for searching that has made it possible in identifying the exact collections of movie posters the participant will need, thus this improved the process of usability. Upon selecting the original category from the movie posters list, all the participants were able to see the detailed description of an item such as 2 GUNS 507005 DOUBLE-SIDED ADVANCE POSTER as it is clearly shown in the screenshot below from the website.

Using the same approach as the above step, the participants did the above task successfully and no challenges were faced.

Step Three Results

With us having done two tasks successfully, it was observed that most of participants were able to add items to the shopping cart successfully without any problem. Nine of the twelve evaluators could create a wish list with no problem. Using the information as provided by the selected, categories all participants were able to navigate cross and through all the selected items making a choice of adding to the shopping list and making a wish list as shown below:

There was a problem in identifying the difference between the wish list and the shopping cart.  Three of the twelve evaluators could not understand the difference between the two.

Step Four Results

Out of the 12 participants, only nine did not complete the tasks successfully as they lacked the provided methods of payment. The three had PayPal accounts and this made them the only participants who were able to perform the entire process successfully. Out of the three, two of them were able to use their PayPal accounts without problems while the other one had forgotten her password. Therefore, only two out of the listed 12 participants successfully executed the task. The payment process can be displayed as the screen below:

From the observation of the two participants while they were making payments, it was evident that the process of making payment was not easy and all the others agreed after observing what the other did who had finished the process successfully. Most of the participants experienced a sense of fear while making payment claiming that it felt unsafe.

Step Five Results

In this step, the participants were supposed to create gift cards for their friends. Using the results from the observations ten of the twelve participants were able to successfully create a gift card for their partner without requiring any help from the observers or instructors while two of them required help as they were stuck when it came to location of providing the destination of the gift card.

Step Six results

The task in step six was used to help the participant for viewing the history by managing their movie store MyAccount. The participants were supposed to get in to their profile and view and access the given information.

• Viewing the status of the order
• View all completed orders
• Viewing the address book
• Viewing the Wish List
• Updating all the myAccount details.
• Viewing all Recent Items.

The screenshot below shows the information on the profile of a customer who has an account with Movie Online Store.

All the participants were able to check their profile and further view all the major activities in their account. Nine out of the Twelve participants were successful in viewing their address book and hence able to make some changes as shown in the screenshot below:

There are other three participants who could not locate the icon for editing as shown in the screen below hence making them unable to make any changes in their address book in  MyAccount.

In general, it can be stated that the majority of the participants were able to perform all the above tasks successfully and that painted a straightforwardness feature for the Movie Store Ecommerce application System.

From the 12 questionnaires filled by the participants, 10 of them showed that the participants were able to use the application while navigating through the webpage while the other two were helped when interacting with the system as they were no clarity in some functionality, such as, the edit section in the address book. In terms of visibility and clarity, all agreed that the info was well structured and it was easy to understand what each and every page contained. The look and feel of the website was said to be satisfying. Thus it was a advantageous as well as disadvantageous situation.

Finding and Recommendations

Using the evaluation result from the analysis on the usability test and questionnaires filled, it was noted that about 83 per cent of the participants were satisfied with the website while the 17 percentage was not fully satisfied. An overall summary of the usability test results is shown in the table below:

The results from the table above present the idea that the application was satisfying the need of the users. This has been termed as something positive as the participants were able to navigate across the item that were available in the given categories and thus able to purchase the selected items online and thus demonstrating the process as very easy. The results above can be tabulated graphically as shown in the figure below:

Recommendations

To improve the human interaction with the movie store E-commerce there are some recommendations that will be needed to be made in order to make the design have the best and quality look and feel:

• There should be use of texts in the places where functions such as the edit and save are applied.
• A proper documentation should be provided so that customers can refer when they have a question with regards to the website.

If the above recommendations are accepted by the company, then the customers will be able to interact fully with the system as there will be a quality look and feel of the system.

Conclusion

It can thus be concluded agreeing to the fact that all the usability features in any given application like the Movie Store Ecommerce Application will rely on the interactions of human features. Some of the features include things like consistency, the look and feel of the system, the appearance of the physical website, effectiveness of the use of use of the system with regards to the available functionalities and the ease of navigation through the given pages. From the evaluation tests done above on the Movie Store Ecommerce Website Application, it will be evident to conclude by saying that it meets the earlier needed and required features and hence this makes it suitable and comfortable for users when they are interacting with it.

References

Bias. (2009, June 05). Balanced Website Design. Retrieved August 23, 2018, 

Bravo, W. (2017). Heuristic Evaluation of Two Travel Websites. Retrieved August 23, 2018, 

Dabrowski, D. (2014). Journal of Marketing Communications. The effect of social media communication on consumer perceptions of brands , 22 (6), 189-214.

Nazim Habibov Assistant Professors of Social Work, U. o. (2010). Journal of Policy Practice . Devolution and the Poverty Reduction Effectiveness of Canada's Provincial Social Welfare Programs: Results from a Time-Series Investigation of a Canadian National Survey , 9 (2), 80-95.

Nielsen, J. ( 2013). Ten Usability Heuristics for UI Design. The most comprehensive collection of Design Principles on the Internet. , 7 (3), 78-90.