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Notes: This design focuses exclusively on importing transferring music to the playback library, and does not consider other secondary goals such as CMJ reporting.
Analysis
Learnability
The symbols used are consistent with most music players and recorders. The "cutting and pasting strips" analogy is also consistent with many music and video editing softwares.
The site is designed for less experienced users, and the main commands are displayed large and clearly labeled at the top of the screen. There are many shortcuts in the program which Andrew fails to notice as a first-time user; for instance, delete can be done with the delete key, a second track can be recorded as the first one plays, segments can be dragged between tracks, and there are various other functions and keyboard shortcuts in the menus. These advanced features are intentionally not presented to the user all at once.
Efficiency
It's hard to tell before we do some user testing, but the program should be relatively efficient to use, with the most common functions clearly visible/close together/having keyboard shortcuts, and the whole recording mechanism designed to be easier than it is in existing software. It would take some exploring to get to this level though.
Safety
This interface is more or less self explanatory (large instructions to drag files to the interface or enter a URL, similar to attachment drag and drop for many e-mail applications). Once the import process has begun, the empty text boxes denote fields the user is required to fill in for the album. The user may not know that these must be filled in to add the album to the playback library. The efficiency feature of filling in details for the zip automatically propagating those details to tracks may go unnoticed until the user actually does it, which can be partially circumvented by forcing the user to enter album-level details before being able to edit the individual tracks (except for track name).
Efficiency
This design's purpose is to maximize efficiency, and the asynchronous import process and propagation of album-level details further this objective. The system automatically picks up non-music files from the zip files, such as cover art or liner notes and attaches them to the album. The system state is always preserved, so a music director short on time can always leave import work to assistants or a later time. One area in which this design is not maximally efficient is if an e-mail contains multiple albums, multiple links must be pasted to the textbox for import. Extracting multiple URLs from an e-mail automatically would be more efficient, but presents logistical challenges.
Safety
Songs and albums can accidentally be included in the drag and drop. However, these can be easily cancelled and removed from the import process. Because all fields are directly editable (textboxes), it makes accidental keyboard focus typos likely. Unnoticed, these typos may get put in the library. An obvious mistake can be corrected by someone accessing the playback system, but a more innocent looking typo may lead to problems. This is a result of the efficiency and safety tradeoff present in this designThere's a short history of undo for editing operations, and users can save multiple copies of the same piece to "branch". Besides deleting songs, we mostly allow the user to make mistakes and go back rather than using confirmation dialogues. Composition inherently doesn't demand too much safety; in fact making mistakes is a tool of composition.