iTunes movie rental screens – see the before-and-after graphic below – would benefit from some simple user experience improvements:

• You do not need to rent directly from a search screen such as ‘New to Rent’. I would anticipate most people click through to the movie first, then choose rent, to reassure themselves on making the correct purchase. So the prominent rental buttons on the search just make the page unnecessarily busy, and should be removed.
• There are also superfluous and visually busy buttons for buying movies, either in a forlorn attempt to upsell – out of all renters, how many people do you honestly think go to rent and end up buying from a browsing screen – or due to store-wide conventions on presenting movies with no consideration for context. These buying buttons are unnecessary.
• There is wasted wordage. People will understand that ‘Mar 20, 2010′ is the release date for a movie when it is in a section called “New to Rent’. You do not need the word ‘Released’.
• The supporting details, such as genre and release date, visually compete with the important title and box cover. The supporting details should be less prominent.
• The box cover is an incredibly powerful selling tool, yet is very small on the page. This should be made as large as feasible.

Here is my mockup. (Click for large version.)

This is purposely a usability evolution, rather than a revolution. I will develop a dramatically improved approach in a future mockup.