Design 3

Design 3 is an Android smartphone app. Having our software run on a phone gives the advantages of portability and a touch screen interface. Disadvantages are that fewer people have smartphones than have laptops, and we lose a lot of screen real estate and alternate input methods (like keyboard input).

Storyboard

Andrew pulls out his Android phone as he walks toward his next class and opens the VoiceComposer app. He is greeted with a large button with a picture of a microphone.

He pushes it, and is prompted to count off a measure and then start singing.



As he counts off four beats ("one, two, three, four"), a bar appears on the screen that starts pulsing at the tempo he specified. Bar lines start scrolling past at every fourth beat. (If he'd counted off to some other number, they would be scrolling past with a different frequency.)



Andrew starts whistling the tune he came up with. As he whistles, notes start trailing from the large vertical bar, attaching themselves to the passing measures. As he holds notes for longer times, their shapes change to notes with larger time values (e.g., eight note to quarter note). A bar showing the length of each note stretches out behind it.



Andrew taps the screen to stop the recording. The song is automatically saved in his 'notation' folder with the current date and time, and he's asked whether he wants to record another song, go to an editing/playback view for the the song he just recorded, look at his saved notations, or exit the program for now.



Andrew still has a few minutes before his class, so he chooses to play back his song and see if he wants to make any quick edits. The editor appears, containing the notes of his song.



He taps the first bar line to play back his tune. It plays. He decides he wants the second note to be a bit lower, so he drags it down a step with his finger. The note sounds as long as he holds his finger down on it, changing as he moves it up and down.



He also wants to transpose the entire piece up a bit, so he double-taps to bring up the menu. He chooses 'edit'->'select all', and then drags a note up to transpose the whole piece.

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Analysis

Learnability

This user interface was designed to be as intuitive as possible, and gives brief explanations of features as the user encounters them. Overall it should be pretty learnable.

Efficiency

The interface is designed with efficiency in mind -- a user should be able to do things quickly and easily. Some of this is necessitated by the smartphone platform, as the limited screen real estate forces us to put less-commonly used tools in a hidden menu.

Safety

Any action short of deleting a note or a file should be fully reversible with a similar action. For instance, moving a note to the wrong pitch can be undone by simply moving the note again.