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- There should be time markings along the screen, probably in increments of five seconds in so, so users can tell how far they are in the song.
- The "cut track" button that used to be in the menu bar was confusing, and no one figured out what it meant.
- We needed to work on how best to represent multiple tracks that would play simultaneously, given the limited screen space.
- People didn't want to tap "main menu" to exit the editing mode, because they were afraid it would discard their changes. We needed either some indication that the app was saving automatically, or an explicit "save" button.
- There used to be a button with a picture of a piano on it, which would change the instrument used to play a track. One user thought that such a button ought to display an on-screen piano keyboard, so that users could enter notes without having to sing into the microphone.
- The main menu should have functionality to duplicate a song, or copy it to a different name.
- The feedback for editing individual notes, particularly the indication of which note was currently selected, needed improvement.
- One (more than one?) user tried to add a harmony line by using the touch screen to add new notes to the same track.
Revised design
"it's an eye?"
"this is clearly volume"
opened song to export
"export is tiny"
...
- A user pointed out that the buttons next to a saved song on the main menu (export, rename, etc) were too small to accurately select with a finger on a phone touch screen.
- Similarly, the "mute/unmute" and "hide/show" buttons on the edit screen might be small and confusing. (However, they'll likely be more recognizable on an actual phone than a quick pencil drawing.)
- The layer metaphor might be confusing. One user tried tapping on the layer buttons for a while before
...
- finding the "record" button, so we might need some feedback on what the buttons do, especially when there are no notes in the song.
- Also, one user recorded over their existing notes before figuring out how to add
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- a second line. We might want to convey more explicitly that they need to change tracks before recording if they want to preserve what they've already written.
- The "save" and "exit" buttons might still need some work. In particular, maybe "save" should prompt for a title the first time a song is saved.
- One user tried to tap and drag on the screen to select notes in a rectangular region. We need to figure out what the app should do if a user taps on empty space in the editing screen: does it start a selection, create a new note at that time and pitch, or do nothing? Should the selection be one-dimensional (time) or two-dimensional (time and pitch)
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- ?
Prototype iteration
- Since users found the top menu bar confusing, we removed one of the buttons and replaced the "Main Menu" button with "Save" and "Exit" buttons.
- We decided that editing individual notes would be done through a modal overlay, so that users could use more of the limited screen space to swipe and drag.
- Audio editors commonly support arbitrarily many tracks, which can be moved around, created, and deleted. Our prototype originally used a scrolling list of tracks, but users seemed confused by adding and changing tracks. We replaced that with a layers metaphor where there are exactly four tracks that are overlaid on top of each other on the same staff.
- We added small time markings at the top of the editing screen, as suggested by users