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Notes: This design focuses exclusively on transferring music to the playback library.
Analysis
Learnability
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- The simple layout and instructions for the drag/drop mechanism give good information scent for starting the import process (also, this is similar to how e-mail attachments work)
- The empty text boxes are fields the user is required to fill in for the album
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- to get added to the playback library
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- , this will be learnable with the addition of a cue to enter information (red boxes, a red note at the top requesting information for the albums)
- It will not be immediately obvious to the user that entering information for the top-level file (e.g. zip file, the entire album) will propagate text down to all the tracks automatically; this can partly be circumvented by forcing the user to enter
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- these top-level
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- boxes before giving them the option of editing track information (except for track names, which should always be immediately editable
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- )
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Efficiency
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- Because this design was focused on efficiency, there is no focus on guiding a first-time user, for example a user must know that they have to click a confirmation button (which only appears after required information has been filled in) after filling in an album's information before the album actually enters the playback library (the "Filed" section at the bottom of the design)
Efficiency
- The asynchronous import allows the user to enter album (and even track level information, we can find out the files contained in a zip without having the entire zip file at once) information while uploading to the system
- The automatic propagation of album-level details to the tracks contained in them allows fast entry of data; additionally, all fields are textboxes so editing requires no additional clicks other than the keyboard focus click
- The system automatically picks up any non-music files from the zip
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- file, such as cover art or liner notes and attaches them to the album
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- System state is always preserved, so a music director short on time can always
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- hand the work over to assistants or leave it for a later time
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- One possible inefficiency is if multiple albums from a single album need to be added to the system, each album link needs to be manually copied (or dragged over) to KaJaM!, it would be even better if we could extract multiple URLs from an e-mail automatically
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- (though getting the raw HTML of
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- an e-mail
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- requires some kind of a save or allowing our system access to the user's e-mail inbox)
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Safety
- A user may drag something that does not contain any music at all (a zip file without music files, or a file with an unrecognized extension) in which case we can safely ignore those files
- A user may drag the wrong album(s) or track(s), but these can be easily canceled during import (there is a cancellation button next to the progress bar of each importing album)
- If the user is editing track names for an especially long album, such that they are unable to see the album name on the screen while editing the track names, they may begin entering track names for a different album
- Because all fields are textboxes, this makes accidental keyboard focus (and ensuing typos) likely; one way to deal
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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 likely. This can create accidental typos which end up in the library. An obvious one can be corrected by someone else (e.g. an assistant) at a later date, but an innocent looking typo may survive. In this case, safety is sacrificed for efficiency.