Usability Review of iTunes

Usability Review of iTunes

With the popularity of the iPod, Apple’s iTunes has emerged as the de facto standard for music library management. We decided to apply the principles of cognitive ergonomics to the iTunes interface in order to identify areas where it can be improved.

The Facts

What: A complete review of iTunes in light of the principles in the field of cognitive ergonomics
When: Fall 2008
Who: Myself, Tammy Greene, and 3 students from the College of Engineering
Where: IOE536 – Cognitive Ergonomics with Nadine Sarter

The Story

The field of cognitive ergonomics has a similar (but not altogether same) approach to interface design and evaluation as the field of human-computer interaction. In particular, there is a much stronger emphasis on ecological interface design (EID) as an alternative to user-centered design. In order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, I participated in an evaluation of iTunes using the principals learned in our survey of cognitive engineering.

We began by identifying major tasks that the user was likely to attempt with the system and narrowing our focus to several of these. We also characterized the likely users by constructing user profiles based on interviews and a survey. We interpreted these profiles in light of the Skill, Rules, Knowledge (SRK) framework in order to accurately describe each user’s level of comfort with iTunes. We also conducted a heuristic evaluation to identify major usability problems. Utilizing principals from EID, we specifically found several violations of principals related to the abstraction hierarchy principal, which demonstrated a key insight of this approach.

Based on our understanding of cognitive engineering, we categorized these problems according to functional area and severity. We then designed and mocked-up suggestions for improvements for many of the problems we encountered, explaining our rationale in light of these same principals.

My Role

As a cross-discipline experience, this project served as an opportunity to reflect on and utilize the strengths of several approaches to interface design. In particular, coming at this project from a user-centered design background enabled me to provide leadership in terms of an effective process for structuring our inquiry. As a team, we all participated in finding and characterizing the issues in iTunes in light of our understanding of the user and EID principals.

Artifacts