Task

You have to give a quick usability evaluation of an online movie rental site. The aim of your evaluation is to determine how easily a user can find and rent a given movie.

The persona that you are to use is that of a 40 year old professional, with reasonable experience in using Office type applications, who is generally time poor and wants to find an escapist movie to watch and relax.

You have two tasks to complete for this assignment:

You have to research and determine a set of usability heuristics that you can use to evaluate a user interface. Your heuristic can be based on an existing heuristic, such as Norman's Usability heuristic, or Schneiderman's golden rules. You are required to:

List the usability heuristic items that you would consider to be essential for this user evaluation;

Briefly describe why you have chosen each item and what you expect it to show you.

Conduct a usability evaluation for an online movie rental site (choose one of the following: http://bigpondmovies.com , http://www.quickflix.com.au, https://play.google.com/movies) and search for a movie with the word "Space" in the title. Go through the rental process as far as you can without proceeding to payment.

Rationale

This assignment covers the following objectives for this subject:

Be able to list and explain the importance of the principles of Design in HCI;

Be able to explain the importance of Usability in interface design;

Be able to list and apply the major Usability guidelines to an interface design;

Be able to create a design for an interface using the Principles of Design.