Usability Evaluation Of Movie Store E-commerce Website

Functionality of the Movie Store E-commerce System

Movie store is an online E-commerce website that provides a collection of photographs, posters and memorabilia from movies, television, music, sport and international celebrity and entertainment. The website is aimed at providing an online platform that allows Movie Store customers to be able to purchase movie store’s products of their choice (Muniz, 2016).. Here customers are able to view a variety of collections ranging from the most popular and latest collections to the least popular ones. For customers to be able to place an online order with movie store, they have to be registered to the system first. Movie store website therefore acts as a link between the customers and the company by providing various interactions with the customers that enable the company to increase its sales as well as market their products This E-commerce website therefore consists of two parts that is the backend and the frontend. The backend allows the company to upload and manage their products as well as view customers details and orders made. The frontend part is what the customers interacts with and provides an avenue for the customers to send their orders to the company. In this section there are a number of functions that the clients can perform including making an online order, updating their account information, gifting cards to friends among other functionalities.

This report therefore is aimed at analyzing the usability features of the frontend part of this E-commerce system. The research entails outlining some of the functionalities of this website and also creating tasks that are to be performed by the selected participants. Results of these tasks are also provided based on consistency, visibility, efficiency, ease of use and navigation (Nielsen, 2013), clarity of the links and ease of information retrieval. Based on the participant’s feedback, this report also provides some of the recommendations that could help improve the usability of the movie store system.

Being an E-commerce website, Movie store provides various ways in which its visitors can play around with it in order to boost its sales. The system provides important functionalities such as customer registration, Customer Login, Viewing of products collections, selection of the products and placing of these orders to the shopping cart. This system also allows customers to create their wish list as well as gift cards for their loved ones (Bravo, 2017). The Movie Store system provides an in-depth description of each product selected by the customer thus enabling the customer to understand a given product more before adding it to cart or the wish list. In this application, for an order to be successfully submitted the customer has to be logged into the system and when logged into the system on the My Account section the customer is able to keep track of their orders status, view history of their completed orders, add edit or remove their address book, update their account details and finally view all the web pages they have recently visited in the application. The mode of payment provided to customers in this application include use of credit or debit card, Cheques and PayPal services. Hence once a customer have placed an order of their Items of choice, he/she can pay using either of the payment methods given. To understand how the customer relates with Movie Store application, the use case below shows various ways in which customers interact with this system.

Analysis of the Movie Store System

From the use case above it is therefore evident that there are many ways in which Movie Store customers can navigate through the application performing various tasks and this will really require a lot of time to analyze all the functionalities. This calls for a proper evaluation procedure that will capture the most important functions of Movie Store System. Therefore, this report will look at some of the above functionalities for the analysis of the application’s usability test features.  The functionalities to be analyze include; creation of gift cards, registration of the customer, customer login, viewing of existing products,  adding items to shopping cart and viewing of customers account details.

In this research, there were a total of twelve participants who had not used Movie Store application before. These participants were selected from both the male and female gender and were all computer literate. In order to analyze this system for usability features observation and questionnaires were used as the primary data collection methods. The evaluation was based on a number of walkthrough tasks defined in this report. The participants were given a period of 45 minutes to perform these tasks and the rest 15 minutes to fill the provided questionnaires as per the tasks carried out. During the execution of this tasks, the researcher observed and analyzed the gestures and reactions of the participants as they navigate through the application. This gave the researcher a firsthand feeling of what to expect when the application is commissioned for production. The following are the walkthrough scenarios that were used during the evaluation of the Movie Store application.

Each participants was required to visit the movie store (www.moviestore.com) E-commerce website and create account by providing all the required details by filling the fields provided. Then upon successful registration, the participants were required access the login webpage and access their accounts by login using the email address and password created during registration process.

Upon successful login to their accounts, the participants were required to use the side bar menu consisted of different links representing various categories of the products provided by Movie Store application. Here the users were required to access each category, view the collection of items present and record at least two items for each category.

For this task, the participants were required to select Latest Additions and Top 100 images from the category list and add two items to the shopping cart for each category. Also they were to access movie posters and collectibles and add two items from both this categories to their wish list. Before adding the two items to their shopping cart, the participants were required to view the items details by clicking the selected item from the list on the two categories given.

Usability Evaluation of the Movie Store System

Once the participants have added items to the shopping cart, the next step was to place an order by checking out using the provided means which are use of credit card, debit card or PayPal depending on the participant’s choice. When using the credit or the debit card, the user was required to provide the card details in order for the payment to be processed from the user’s bank. If the user chooses PayPal, the participant had to log into their PayPal account and transfer funds to movie store PayPal account.

This task needed the participants to create gift cards for each other by visiting the gift card webpage, and provide the details of the gift card recipient and submit to create the gift card. Here the participants were required to click on gift card link on the far left corner of the movie store application, then once the gift card page was opened, the participant was to provide the person to whom he or she is being gifted the card before submitting their details.

This task required the participants to go to my account and view their current orders status, Completed orders, their address book, wish list account details and the recent items they have checked. Here an option was given to the participants to update their personal information and change their address book information.

All the above tasks were aimed at providing guidance to the participants as they interact with the system. With this approach it was easy to analyze the ability of the participants in interacting with the online application as they conduct various activities (Sceviour, 2010).. Upon successful accomplishment of all the tasks, the participants were required to fill a questionnaire giving their views concerning various usability features as well as recommendations that could help improve the application in providing quality service delivery.

The evaluation methodologies used provided a clear understanding of the system by looking at various usability features such as consistency in design, clarity of the information provided into the application, ease of navigation from one web page to the other, ease of use of various features available in the application, visibility of the website contents as well as efficiency of the Movie Store application (Bias, 2009). These feature are very essential in every human interaction system since they dictate how the users of the application will relate with it while performing various functions provided in the system.  The structure of the questionnaires used were both closed-ended and open-ended. This approach was to help the users give out their views in a more open manner without being limited in any way. This ensured that participant’s genuine feedback was well captured and that nothing was withheld back hence getting out quality usability information from the evaluation process.

Conclusions and Recommendations

During the evaluation process and after the above tasks were completed, a number of results were found both through observation and by analysis of the questionnaires. The results were based on the participant usability of the Movie Store application and the feedback they gave by filling the questionnaires provided. This section therefore provides an in-depth result for each task performed and how these results relate to how the participants interacted with the system.

The purpose of this task was to evaluate the process of registering new customers to the application and the accessibility of the customer’s account. It was observed that this task was successfully carried out by all the participants without any problems. The participants were able to create their accounts using their valid email address and set their own passwords as well as providing other personal information that would be used to identify the customer and also during shipping. There were no challenges reported in this tasks apart from locating the Sign in or Create an account links which were in small fonts and were located at the topmost part as it can be shown below.

Figure 1: Sign in or Create an account Links

Figure 2: Create an Account Webpage

Figure 3: Login Webpage

But once the links were located the participants were able to proceed with the process of creating their accounts and login into them successfully. This showed that these two functionalities were well structured and that it was not hard to join the membership of the Movie Store organization as this application provided that platform which was more effective and easy to use.

This scenario was aimed at testing user’s capabilities to navigate to various product categories using the sidebar category links provided as shown below.

Figure 4: Category

Using the above links all the participants were able to navigate through the all the categories and as observer they were able to select two items from each category and vie their detailed descriptions. From the response from the participants, the links were easy to understand and provided a good way to search for items based on the category the items fall in. A screenshot one of the participants results in accessing the movie posters items category web page.

Figure 5: Movie Poster category

Under the movie poster category the participants were also able to select from the dropdown list what kind of movie posters they wanted to see amongst the choices provided which include: Original, Reprint, British Quads and Personality as seen in the interface above. This feature simplified further the search as it was possible to particularly identify the exact collection of movie posters the participant needed hence improving the usability process. Upon selection of the original from the movie posters list, the participant was able to see the description of an item such as 2 GUNS 507005 DOUBLE-SIDED ADVANCE POSTER as shown in the image below.

Figure 6: Guns 507005 Double-sided advance poster

With the same approach all the participants performed the task successfully and they did not face any specific challenge during the process.

Having performed task two successfully it was observed that majority of the participants 9 out of 12 could comfortably add items to their shopping cart without as well as wish list without problems. With the given categories all participants were able to navigate through and select items of their choice and make their shopping cart and wish list respectively as shown below.

Figure 7: Shopping Cart

Figure 8: Wish List

Even though the process was conducted in a smooth manner, majority of the participants needed to know the difference between the shopping cart and the wish list. It was noted that 3 out of twelve could not differentiate between the two and added all the items on the shopping cart with no item included on their wish list. Therefore a clear difference between the two features was necessary in order not to confuse the customers.

This tasks was not successfully performed by the majority of the participants. 9 out of 12 of the participants did not have debit/credit card nor PayPal account therefore they were unable to perform the tasks. The other three participants all had only PayPal account and they are the only ones who were able to perform this tasks. Out of the three participants who performed this task only two were successful as the remaining one had forgotten the PayPal account password. Therefore, out of 12 participants only two successfully executed the task. The payment process was as shown in the screen below.

Figure 9: Checkout

By observing the process by which the payment was carried out by the two participants, the rest of the participants all agreed that the process was not hard and it was clear and easy to understand. However the participants expressed some fear on how the application ensured safety during payment process. This was critical considering that credit/debit cards and PayPal means are all personal and private information and any exposure of this details could lead to great harm to the owner.

This entailed creation of gift cards amongst the participants. From the result obtained, 10 out of 12 of the participants successfully created gift cards for their partners without any help from the researchers while the other two participants needed some help first to locate where the Gift Card link was but after that they were able to create a gift card for their friends as shown below.

Figure 10: Gift Card

This tasks was aimed at helping the participant know how to view their history and manage their movie store account. Here the participants were required to get their account and access the following information.

• View Order Status
• View Completed
• View Address Book
• View Wish Lists
• Update  Account Details
• View  Recent Items

 My account webpage is as shown below.

Figure 11: My Account

All the participants were able to view the status of their orders and the list of all completed orders (in this case there was none because the participants had not used Movie Store before). 9 out of 12 successfully view their address book and made some changes as shown below.

Figure 12: Shipping Details

The other three participants could not locate the edit icon in the screen shown below hence they were unable to make any changes to their address book.

Figure 13: Address Book

For the wish list, account details and recent items all the participants were able to access them and view their details more swiftly without problems. In general, majority of the participants were able to perform this task successfully and that painted a great simplicity feature for the movie store application.

From the twelve questionnaires collected 10 participants found the application easy to use and navigate through while 2 participants cited that they needed help to interact with the application as some functions were not clearly outlined such as the edit function in address book section. On the visibility and clarity of the website contents all the participants agreed that the information was well structured and stated and this made it easy to understand what a certain webpage was all about. On the physical design of the web pages all the participants expressed their satisfaction with the look and feel demonstrated by the movie store web application. 11 participant also said that the application is performing its tasks more effectively without delay and this was more satisfactory while only one participant suggested some few changes especially the use of text where icons were used since not every user is familiar with the icons used in the application.

Based on the results above, it can therefore be seen that a great percentage of the participants were able to perform the evaluation tasks successfully without any help while the few that needed help were also able to successfully accomplish the tasks after clarification. This results therefore means that the application usability is simple and easy considering that these participants had not interacted with the application before. From the above data, 83% of the participants were satisfied with the ease of use and navigation across the application and they were able to do the tasks solely while only 17 % of the participants had to be helped to perform the tasks. 100% or all the participants noted that the content of the database related very well with its functions and made it easy to interact the application as they were easy to understand. An overall summary of the usability test results is shown in the table below.

Usability Feature	Satisfactory	Not Satisfactory	No help	Needed Help
Consistency	12	–	–	–
Functionalities			10	2
Physical Design	12	–	–	–
Effectiveness	11	1	–	–
Information clarity and visibility	12	–	–	–
Ease of use and navigation	10	2	–	–

Table 1: Overall Resuslts

From the results shown in the table above, it is evident that the application was found to be satisfactory by a great number of the participants. This is a good thing for the Movie Store as it shows that through this application their customers will be able to access their products and make an online purchase as demonstrated in the evaluation process carried out by the researchers. The above results can therefore be expressed graphically as shown below.

Figure 14: Overall Result Chart

In order to improve the human interaction with movie store E-commerce website there some of the recommendations that ought to be implemented as suggested by the participants during evaluation. Some of this recommendations include:

1. Use of text in places where icons for functions such as edit and save are used. This will help the user understand the system more and help him/her perform the intended function correctly and easily. This was suggested as a result of having users who do not have knowledge on what various icons represent in the application.
2. Another recommendation was that the movie store should provide a help documentation that the user can refer to when not able to perform a given task as it was noted during the evaluation process

These were the only recommendations made by few participants that experienced challenges during the execution of the evaluation tasks. If this recommendations are fully implemented then any user can be able to navigate through the application without any help. These recommendations help in improving the functionality and usability of movie store application.

Conclusion

It can therefore be concluded that, usability of any application including movie store E-commerce website relies greatly on various human interactions features. These features include: application consistency, the look and feel of the design and the physical appearance, effectiveness of the application as well as how easy it is to use the functionalities and navigate through. From the evaluation tests above movie store application meet all of these features and thus making it suitable for users to interact with it. Also for any software or application to pass the usability test threshold, it has to satisfy the needs of its users. Therefore, movie store owners should consider the suggestions made by the participants during evaluation process in order to ensure that their online system meets their clients satisfaction and improve how the clients interacts with it.

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