4505 S. Maryland Parkway
Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

December 8, 2011

Amazon Website Director
Amazon Corporate Headquarters
1200 12th Ave. S., Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98144

Dear Website Director:

This is the analysis report from the usability test run on your website. Throughout the course of testing the usability of your website our group has found some points that could be changed to increase the simplicity of navigating your website and extracting information from it. Our group conducted the usability tests for this site on November 4, 2011.

While we were able to find all of the necessary information we needed on the website, we noticed some things that could be changed a little bit to make them more efficient. Some of the subjects commented that some of the sections they were asked to look for were so small they were almost unnoticeable.

Our usability test was aimed at a group that has experience with computers, but are not experts or considered professionals. We centered the tests around this computer literacy group because the majority of the people who traffic this website fit into that category of computer literacy.

If you have any questions about the tests or the results feel free to contact us so we can answer your questions.

Sincerely,

Prepared for:

Website Director
IMDb.com
Seattle, Washington

By:

English 407a Students
Professor Mark Lyon
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

December 8, 2011
Findings
For our usability test subjects the group was comprised of eight subjects, one female and seven males. For a more in depth analysis of the differences in ages with correlation to the usability test we used a subject group whose ages spanned a much wider range with our youngest subject being twenty years old and our oldest subject being sixty-six years old. The average age of our subjects is thirty-seven years old. Before selecting our candidates we gave a group of pre-test questions that asked them to rate their experience with computers on a scale of one to ten, ten being very experienced, one being not experienced. All of our candidates said they are between six and ten, with one outlying score of four.

Ex. 1 shows the average amount of time it took the subjects to complete each tasks, timed in seconds.

As you can see the first, second and fifth tasks were the most complicated for the average subject to complete, with the third and fourth tasks being relatively simple for the subjects. We found the most complicated task for subjects to complete was finding how many memorable quotes were listed for the TV series “Lost.”

After the completion of the usability test, subjects were asked to fill out a posttest survey. This would ask them to rate all of theirs tasks on a scale of one to ten to judge the difficulty of each task and the same rating system for the speed of completing the task.

Another purpose of the posttest survey was to allow the subjects to voice any complaints about the website. After reviewing all of the subjects’ responses we found that 75% of the subjects found the webpage to be too cluttered. Several of the subject placed the blame on too much text and too little visual aid, making the website very difficult to use effectively.

Our group found that overall the test subjects approved of the website and found it to be very effective in conveying necessary information. Each of the subjects even commented that if they need information on a movie, actor, show or director they would use this site again.

Recommendations
To best analyze a solution to the problems with the website and to streamline the efficiency of the site we drew up some recommendations of changes that should be applied to the site.

After reviewing the suggestions from the usability test subjects we decided that the most overlying thing that need to be fixed is the appearance of key target areas.

Make each section stand out more
Instead of putting text on one of the movie result pages make all the sections