Usability Testing : Vine

What is Vine?

Vine is a short-form video sharing service. Founded in June 2012 and was acquired by microblogging website Twitter in October 2012, just prior to its official launch. The service allows users to record and edit short looping video clips, and revine.

Objectives :

Identify usability and pain points that I can find in my first time using the App. Since my Phone cannot run the App because of some issues, I will be using the vine website as the subject of my tests.

Test Tasks:

1. Sign up
2. Explore
3. Profile
4. TV Mode
5. Search
6. Settings
7. Uploading
8. Home Feed
9. Following
10. Tagging

Analysis:

Since it is my first time in visiting the website I will be going through the things first time users will be experiencing and expecting after registering.

Sadly you can only register a Vine account via the Vine App

1. Sign up
   - I find difficulty in registering as I cannot see the sign-up button only the sign-in which either you can use your Twitter account or your vine account to login, which can only be created via the App

Sample of what you can expect to see after registering

2. Explore
- Exploring the site was easy and didn't require much effort in finding interesting vines with the tabs located on the left side I can know what’s trending today for Vine, what I did noticed and like while navigating is that the vines will only automatically play when it is in the center of your screen and will stop once it is out. The other I noticed is that by default the sound is muted, I speculate that as to avoid sudden burst of deafening sound when a vine is suddenly played and the headphone or speaker is set at maximum

Since it is a new account don’t expect for it to have any content

3.Profile
- The user profile is thesame as that of Twitter and little difference can be noticed

4. TV Mode
- I find this option to be useful as it changes the view to full screen and it directly goes to the next clip without looping for another round

Useful search indeed

5.Search
- The search option is pretty helpful as it shows the #hastags associated to your keyword, the profile if it’s a user, and a pin to a location if it ever matches a place in maps

pretty much thesame

6. Settings
- The profile setting is made simple and easy to understand with no difficulties in changing

sad indeed

7. Uploading
- Sadly you can only upload via the Vine App as the website does not allow uploading outside of the App.

8. Home Feed
- The home feed shows the vines of all the users your are currently following arrange from newest to oldest.

9. Following
- Following a user is made simple with just one-click away

10. Tagging
The tagging feature of the App is the same as that of tweeter as it uses the hastag sign to link it to the profiles of other users

Findings:

• As stated before one of the first problems is that you cannot register unless you have downloaded the Vine App and the only way to upload your vines is also via the App as it is currently impossible to upload through the website.
• I also noticed that the vines automatically pause when you go to another tab in your web browser, it’s pretty convenient as you won’t suffer in replaying the clip when you accidentally click another tab.
• Clicking the vine won’t send you to another page but only pauses it and the option to mute it can also be found on the upper left corner of the clip which is pretty good given how many are frustrated to videos that redirects you to another page when you click on it found on other social medias.

Suggestions:

1. First enable registration via the website and also enable uploading of vines through the site.
2. On the TV mode enable a loop button, to give users to either loop the current vine or just continue on going through the feed
3. Lastly I would like to have an option or a tab in my profile page with the archives of all the vines that I have liked and revined

All-in-all the app is great the suggestions are just my own nitpickings and even with or without it the Vine will still be a hit.