Designing for user experience is an essential part of any product, particularly those aimed at a wide demographic. Looking at the product and how it would be used in the real world from the point of view of a user-customer can provide valuable information that can help influence the way the product looks and behaves. It is important to not only consider what a product can do, but why it should be able to do it and how it does so [1].
Usability Goals
Usability goals can help guide the design process by highlighting and prioritising the most important aspects of the experience of using the product. It helps keep the design focused and on track to accomplish what we set out to do. The following are the usability goals we aim to achieve with WatchTogether:
- effective to use – WatchTogether must allow users to simultaneously start a video on multiple computers
- easy to use – it should not be difficult to learn how to use it
- easy to reuse – it should be easy to pick it up and use it again.
- efficient to use – it should not take a lot of time to set it up and make use of it
- safe to use – it should allow the user to use it with low risk of making mistakes and running into errors; in the case of mis-input (eg. selecting the wrong file), it should allow user to undo their actions, and re-do a step taken wrongly.
- good utility – it should have a variety of tools to enable different functionalities and have options to allow for different use cases: friends and families watching films/TV series for casual enjoyment, business users watching training or informational videos
Reference: [1] Garrett, J. J. (2010). User Experience and Why It Matters. In The elements of user experience: user-centered design for the web and beyond. Pearson Education.
