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- Importing Digital Media: the importing process facilitates quick learnability due to visual cues and affordances (Drag and Drop sign and Currently Importing progress bar)
- Media Playback: the playback process is familiar to the average user (control panel is similar to other popular music players), and the search function is displayed prominently to help users locate specific music tracks. In addition, the tabbed view design is modeled after popular browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer), with a "plus" button that hints strongly that users can create new views.
- Editing Track Information: it is not obvious that double-clicking on a track bring up the edit mode, so perhaps a hover message will be helpful to inform users of this. However, once the user enters edit mode, many affordances such as blinking cursor, custom tags and datepicker help users realize the editable fields.
- Exporting CMJ List: the export view button is displayed conspicuously on the interface, allowing new users to easily realize how to export and save a particular view for CMJ reporting.
Efficiency
This is about efficiency.
Safety
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The focus of this design is completeness of functions, so aspects of efficiency may have to be compromised to maintain balance with learnability of all the different functions:
- Importing Digital Media: the importing process maximizes efficiency by allowing multiple file drag and drops. Users can download a multitude of zip files and drop them all at once onto the KaJaM! interface, where they will get queued up. In addition, the KaJaM! interface allows simultaneously importing, with the exact number customized by the user. Finally, importing is asynchronous, so users may start previewing and editing music tracks while they get imported.
- Media Playback: because the KaJaM! application is focused on importing digital media instead of playback, the playback process is not designed for efficiency. In fact, there is no playlist where users can edit their current playback sequence, hence there is no way to add multiple songs to the queue.
- Editing Track Information: editing information is performed individual for each track, currently there is no existing method for users to edit multiple tracks at a time, exposing a major efficiency disadvantage. However, this is the tradeoff between efficiency and safety, where this design leans towards safety to prevent users from accidentally changing information of multiple tracks.
- Exporting CMJ List: the exporting function is simple, fast, and omits trivial information from list generation (CMJ reports do not contain date imported and release date) to maximize efficiency.
Safety
Due to the complexity of this interface, we decided to favor safety aspects of the design over efficiency to prevent user errors midst confusion. Many features of the interface emphasize safety:
- *Importing Digital Media: *t
- *Media Playback: *be
- *Editing Track Information: *editi
- *Exporting CMJ List: *the