The Website: Metacritic.com
The website I chose for this heuristic evaluation usability assignment is Metacritic.com. Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews from movies, tv shows, video games, music, etc. Reviews can be searched by category as seen at the top bar on the homepage. I chose this because my group is focusing on gaming websites and their usability.
Method
My evaluation method was to go on about my specified task while keeping a tab open with the heuristic methods and nothing if one popped up while attempting to complete my task successfully. This ensured the heuristic methods stayed fresh in my mind so that I wouldn’t miss any violations of them.
My Task
The task I am attempting to complete is searching for the most recent addition to the Borderlands video game franchise: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and attempting to leave a review of the game. I have never used Metacritic in this fashion so I am exploring this from a novice user’s perspective. This is valuable as I will not be thinking of this like a designer but as someone new to the site.
Usability
The first thing I did was make a search for the game I was looking for. Immediately I want into a violation of Match Between System And The Real World, and Error Prevention. Typing out the game’s entire name did not give me the result I wanted. Instead it gave me a long list of results, several of which were all identical. I had to scroll down in order to find the specific information I wanted. The way I expected this to work is by showing me a much smaller list including the game, and any related content. The site is listing these in this manner to differentiate between the different consoles the game is played on but the fact that they are in identical sets of three with the only difference being small text denoting which console they are on, it is very easy to make a mistake and click on the wrong version for yourself. Especially on smaller screens or with users who may have vision problems such as myself. This does not prevent errors, but in fact makes them far more likely to occur.
The next thing I did was to click on the version for PC as that is what I play the game on. This brought me to the game’s page where I found another heuristic violation: Aesthetic & Minimalist Design. There is a lot of information on this page and some of it is redundant. Critic and User Reviews are each listed twice on this page, both within the users line of sight. These headings are also hyperlinked which means they do the exact same thing and there is no need to have both right in front of the user. This creates an excess of information and can be overwhelming to new users.
Solutions
For the Match Between System And The Real World issue, I would first incorporate the game’s DLC page into the game page itself. This would reduce the number of immediate results and allow you to narrow your choice down much more efficiently. The next thing I would do is have just one entry for the game instead of separating by console. This ensures that users that are just there to get general information about the game do not have to worry about selecting the right one. This would help to alleviate the Error Prevention violation as well because there would be fewer options with more clarity.
On the following page, I would remove the top User/Critic Review tabs and replace those with a DLC tab which players can use to get information on the game’s DLC if applicable. This solves the problem of having redundant information and instead presents the user with more usable and relevant information.
Conclusion
These were the two heuristic violations I found within the scope of my attempted scenario (Attempting to leave a review). I had no issue after the appearance of the final error explained above. I was able to sign in and post a review with no problem whatsoever.