A3 – iTunes Group | Human-Computer Interface Technology

Sam, Yared, Connie, Alejandro

i. Major problems that we found include:

Inconsistencies in the left-hand menus (H4). We can fix this by keeping a left-hand menu present the whole time, rather than changing it constantly (this would also be consistent with the Finder).
Difficulty finding the Help file in Windows, and Help doesn’t occur while not online (H10). Have a question mark icon in the upper left-hand bar.
Inconsistency between top-bar menus (Music, Videos, etc.) (H4). Have “List” do the same thing in both, add an “Unplayed” option under Music, parallel to “Unwatched”.
The status window is used for all statuses, and will block out other information (H1). This can be fixed by splitting the status window into several windows with specific purposes.
The user’s can’t stop the “Up Next” playlist from by default adding the next songs on a list to it. (H3). We could simply have this be something that the user can deactivate through the Preferences menu.

ii.

We wouldn’t necessarily have looked for “help” if we hadn’t been told to.
Most of the problems we found were issues that we encountered throughout extended use of the program in a normal setting. The challenge was then to see under which Nielsen heuristic these issues fit. In that sense, the Nielsen heuristics made us think more about what category these problems fit under and how we could change them.

iii.

Many users found “problems” related to the system changing form generation to generation. These are more about getting used to the changes than real “problems”, and do not fit within the Nielsen heuristics.
A heuristic we could use is “Generational Consistency” and “Cross-Platform Consistency”.

iv.

Name five Nielsen heuristics.
How important do you think it is to keep programs consistent from one generation to the next? Should this be considered when judging the heuristics of a program?

Links to our PDFs:

Alejandro: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qobyn9i3zmoe59k/av_notes.pdf