Website interface and function rebuild
Vitamovie.com serves to a small community of asian movie enthusiasts. The community is compromised of mostly non-American visitors; the Alexa.com lists United Arab Emirates and Singapore as the top sources of visitors additionally Google Analytics lists Singapore, Philipines and Great Britain as the top 3 sources. Additionally the majority of the 1,530 registered users the majority are female.
Vitamovie.com has not served content according or specialized for a specific user demographic or country. The interface has been experimental and the overall attitude of the website has been closer to a hubby than an internet business.
In its current state it receives on average 1,233 users per day producing 2.8 clicks per user and an average 36.2 minutes spent on site per user. Additionally it has an average of 2 registrations per day who generate 5 comments per day.
Our original intention was to develop a search /review interface in replacement of the traditional star rating system: using emotion icons a.k.a smiley faces picked by the user/viewers to describe their emotion after watching a film allowing a searcher to look for films via emotions. We had envisioned the emotion rating system as an addition to the current interface at Vitamovie.com.
Emotion smiley face survey and set
We developed the smiley faces from a survey we conducted asking Poly students to name a recent film they had watched, describe the emotion they had after watching the film, draw the emotion in the provided circle and say how close they think the drawing is to their emotion. The surveys were scanned and the “best” smileys were traced in Adobe Illustrator. The films from the surveys were imputed to a spreadsheet under their corresponding emotions. The smileys were given different transparencies according to their “popularity”: the smileys with the most films had 100% alpha and the next one had 2 less hence 20% alpha and so on.
A new interface was designed of the website for the user test. The emotions were presented next to each other in a 6 per row from with all the films from the survey displayed below the emotions. The intent was for the user to click on a smiley face activating a rearrangement of the movie listing showing only films with that emotion.
User interface test
The interface was build using Adobe Catalyst ( it provided rapid object oriented building), nevertheless the interface was not complete, only the first page of the website was ready for user testing. Since it was not complete, we asked the users to give their opinion of the interface and to suggest any inprovements or companinets that they might have. Luckely the user test session was susssesful at producing many sugestions.
user #1:
Confused about the color od the displayed emotuions [the smilyes are all black and white with different treanparancies]
Wants the ability to choose moultiple smileyes at once, with the results displayed in a most matched to least manner.
The smileyes are hard to recognise, would want color, atleast 3, to be present in the smileyes.
Would want to be able to adjuest the dgeree of the emotion when revieins the film.
user #2:
Confusied about the transparancies of the smileyes
Commnets availbe below the film on the single fiml page
Presence of colors in the smileyes
Is not sure about the black and white
would want smileys to continue to have descriptive text
would want a pentagon chart to display the degree of the emotions on when reviewins the film, allowing the user to set emotions degress when searching.
wants a top 5 emotion listing.
ability to repost wrong emotion, [a spam review]
user #3
wants more visible interaction with the smiley buttons
asked if the films are displayed in a netfilx or youtibe fasion and was happier with the youtube interface
ability to