The Website
The website being chosen for evaluation is called IGN, formerly known as Imagine Games Network. IGN Entertainment is a multimedia review aggregation site. The website also hosts interviews with titans of the game and film industries such as Sony and Microsoft, along with also streaming award ceremonies for these mediums as well. The website is also home to walkthroughs, game rankings, and articles about video games, movies, tv shows, and anime. Users can also purchase official merch from several of their favorite intellectual properties through the IGN Store. IGN is one of the most highly regarded “go to” sites for fans of games and other creative mediums.
Persona:
The persona that our gaming group chose to focus on for this task is a 17 to 23 year old gamer who enjoys playing games from many different genres of games, that range from role-playing games or RPGs, first-person shooters or FPS’, and multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBAs, puzzle games, action adventures, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or MMORPGs and survival/horror. These individuals are part of the middle class, attend some type of school (high-school, college, or trade) and have at least a part-time job or receive some form of monetary allowance to give them the means to purchase video games. Their experience level with gaming ranges from beginner to expert since IGN has a wide variety of content available ranging from reviews to comprehensive walkthroughs.
User:
The user is a single mother in her 50s. She is a librarian and has little to no experience with console video games and has never used IGN Entertainment’s website.
Tasks:
- We chose the specific task of accessing the Game of the Year awards for 2021 because the user is particularly interested in what’s trending in the gaming world. This user does not have a specific genre in mind for the games they would like beyond Legend of Zelda.
- Find a walkthrough for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to get an idea of how long the adventure will take to complete. With today’s top games at almost $60 each, many gamers do not want a game they can complete in a few hours. Gamers like to feel that they are getting their money’s worth.
- Look for reviews of the other Game of the Year contenders and see if any of their reviews are intriguing enough to warrant purchasing a different game.
Test:
I sat down with my user and had her pull up the IGN Entertainment website. I outlined the three tasks listed above and explained that I was just looking for her to try to complete them to the best of her ability and encouraged her to talk through her thought process as well. The first task given to her was to access the article detailing the Game of the Year for 2021. Initially she tried the Rewards tab on the main page.
When that failed to produce the desired result, she attempted to find it by clicking on the News tab. This also did not provide the desired result and the user started to become frustrated with the website’s lack of clear direction. Technically the information the user was looking for would be under the News tab, but there is no simple way for users to sort through IGN’s massive collection of articles to find a specific one.
The next thing the user did was to look for a search feature. She clicked on the magnifying glass below the tabs, and was frustrated to find out that the search feature only allows you to search for video games specifically and not more generic search queries. A proper site search feature would go a long way here to operate in line with Nielsen heuristic: match between system and real world. At this point, the user gave up on this task and asked to move on to the next task on the list.
The next task was to locate a walkthrough for the video game Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. She was able to complete this task far easier than the previous task by clicking on the Guides tab and scrolling down to All Guides and selecting Most Popular.
The third task proved just as fruitless as the first because we ran into the exact same problem of being unable to locate the article that held the list of Game of the Year 2021 entries.
Analysis:
Due to the obstacles faced by the user in completing the first and third task, I came to the conclusion that expanding the limited search function available on the main page to enable users to search not just for video games but for the articles written by IGN Staff as well would be a considerable improvement in site navigability and user experience. Adding a feature to the News tab to enable article searching or article sorting by author, or keywords, or even adding a specific section for games of the year would solve all of the obstacles faced by the user performing this usability test. If these changes had been implemented the user would have had little to no trouble locating the information they were seeking despite being a complete novice of the website.