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This is the interface used by the DJ to manage their music library, edit and create playlists, and start playing a playlist/open it up for voting. We elected to have two main panes. One displays all the songs in the library, while the other allows for the editing of playlists. This choice of one detail pane for the music library was motivated by our paper prototyping when we found out that multiple panes (such as one for song details and one for album organization) led users to be confused about how to use the interface. Another key design choice was to allow users to add songs to a playlist by dragging them. This choice was motivated by our paper prototyping when all the testers tried to drag songs but weren't 'allowed' to do so. In addition, we allowed for multi-select drag after computer prototyping and realizing there was an efficiency problem. An 'add song to playlist' dialog box was an
alternative to dragging but we found dragging to be much more intuitive and efficient for users.
Another important part of the interface was the use of tabs for playlist management. The use of tabs is common in many other interfaces so there was a relatively flat learning curve. After feedback from computer prototyping, we added a vote count to the songs in the playlist to give the dj more feedback and better visibility. The ability to rename a playlist was also added after feedback from computer prototyping pointing out the problem with error correction.
Voting Interface
This is the voting interface used by partygoers. A key design choice was to use plus and minus buttons to vote for songs. Originally, we had considered using a sliding interface. However, we noticed during paper prototyping that many people pressed the arrows that were supposed to afford sliding instead of actually sliding. The use of buttons ended up being natural and easy to implement. Only the song title and artist are displayed versus more possible meta data associated with a song such as length. Only those two fields were used to keep the interface simple and draw attention to the most important information about a song.
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Computer prototyping showed that plus and minus buttons were more compact than words on a mobile phone device enabling the buttons to stay on the same line. In addition, neutral was changed to a vote count to give information to the users about how popular a song was. A vote count also makes it clear whether or not the users vote had been counted, a visibility problem noticed from the computer prototyping.
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