User Experience Review of iMovie and Audacity

Since I am currently taking a UX design course by Google, I decided to share some of my user research and assignments. Questions, feedback, your thoughts would be appreciated! I’d love to talk to UX designers out there and learn more from each other! :)

A user experience you think is great and why:

Since I started creating digital content for Youtube, I am using iMovie and I found it easy and user-friendly from beginners to more advanced users. A great product is one that understands who the user is and their need and lets them solve their problems quickly and intuitively. iMovie is a video editor tool. Here is why I think it’s great:

1. Accessibility and user intuitiveness: It is designed for anyone with different levels of editing experience. When I initially opened the app it was a long time ago, but even after a few years with a changed UI, I was still able to navigate quickly through opening a new project, adding media files (audio, pictures, video content that I wanted to edit). The intuitive drag and drop was great. I even discovered that you can drop things directly to iMovie from your Downloads folder!
2. The UI and information architecture: UI elements including layout and minimal yet on-point use of icons helps the user to navigate and do actions with ease. For example, on the right side, you’ll see the Project Media sidebar, it’s like your organization folder with different projects/libraries. Information architecture helps the user to organize their projects and choose pictures, videos to edit. Also, the most commonly used Media items and Effects are also sorted out and presented in the bar above: My Media | Audio | Transitions | Background | Titles, which makes it easy and fast for the user to use them.
3. Usability — you can use media from another project in your current project, you don’t have to go back, copy and paste, or upload it again — it is already in iMovie! The timeline view is minimal and clutter-free. You have the video tracks with a small representation as well as audio tracks in green with waveforms. There is also a convenient slider with zoom-in/out available right next to the tracks on the timeline bar.
4. Well-balanced features. Some might argue that iMovie has pretty limited features and tools, but I think that they made a great job balancing the main and commonly used features like timeline bar, trimming as well as more advanced features like color grading, speed editing, how elements can fit (crop/fit, ken burns). The cool thing is that a user clicks and they can see the feedback immediately, they don’t need to confirm or do something extra like select the exact frame and then apply, as long as they are on the desired frame/track. There is no preview, but you can watch, and if you don’t like it, just undo the action or revert changes
5. Improve labeling: It would be helpful to add tooltips, a hovering text that explains the action/description or function of the icon. For example, for the advanced toolbar that appears above the viewing screen.

iMovie’s interface

A user experience you think needs improvement and why:

Let's review another editing tool I recently tried. Audacity is a free audio recorder and editor. It is used by many digital content creators like podcasters, vloggers, YouTubers, educators, and singers. I used it to record a voice-over for my videos. It was fairly easy to find this program, download, and install it. But when I opened the app it was on one hand very simple yet confusing. There too many buttons and no navigation or labels to guide me on what exactly they mean. The only thing that made sense were the play, pause, stop and record buttons. The record button was a larger red dot and the platy was a green chevron, classic and recognizable for many users. But many others didn’t make sense since they were just icons that were all jumbled up on the screen right next to each other. There wasn’t enough breathing room for elements and they all fused into one. Funny enough there was so much space available right below the tools bar, why couldn’t they just use that space on the interface for the toolbar to expand? I was quite lost at first and didn’t know what any of those buttons do — no guidance or labels. I had to watch tutorials to understand how to record and edit.

Audacity can improve the user experience significantly by doing the following:

1. Typography and iconography: Increase the size of the toolbar and font of labels to give elements more space because it is unclear and confusing. Icon and text are not accessible for people who are dyslexic, colorblind, or have a hard time reading small and unclear fonts.
2. Accessibility: Color can help communicate mood, tone, and critical information. Primary, secondary, and accent colors can be selected to support usability. Sufficient color contrast between elements can help users with low vision see and use your app
3. Usability: Put commonly used actions from the navigation bar which is above into the toolbar such as “Normalize” and “Bass boost” to give users immediate actions. Also, allowing users to move and scale the toolbars would also improve usability and user interactions.
4. Modern UI refresh: Improve the navigation and labeling of the common features by refreshing the icons. Make icons more accessible and clear, padding should be increased (the living area of the icon). They are also too bold which distracts the user. Most common action buttons like Play, Stop, Record, should be bold, the rest should be medium. Also differentiating between icons that represent something and actual buttons will help improve user interactions (system icons vs product icons) and use grouping for similar elements.
5. Feedback: Redesign the time bar/dragging. When I try to see other parts of the record while playing, it doesn’t allow me. Make it more clear how the user can customize and adjust the track view (the waveforms), users shouldn’t have to go to the manual and forums to know about these settings.

Audacity’s interface