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This design is focused on providing the most functionalities to users, hence the comprehensive interface appears to be quite crowded and busy, which decreases the learnability aspect. However, this disadvantage is mitigated by the fact that the interface is modeled after common music players such as iTunes, MediaMonkey and Spotify. This maintains external consistency, allows users to utilize knowledge in the world, and enables them to get familiar with the interface quickly.

• Importing Digital Media: the importing process facilitates quick
  • Facilitates easy learnability due to visual cues and affordances (Drag and Drop sign and Currently Importing progress bar)
• Media Playback: the playback process
  • Control Panel is familiar to the average user (
  control panel is
  • similar to other popular music players)
  , and the search
  • Search function is displayed prominently to help users locate specific music tracks
  . In addition, the tabbed
  • 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
  • Not obvious that double-clicking on a track bring up the edit mode,
  so perhaps
  • maybe a hover message will be helpful to inform users of this
  . However, once
  • 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
  • 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

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
  • Importing process maximizes efficiency by allowing multiple file drag and drops. 
  • Users can
  download
  • drop 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
  • Allows simultaneously importing, with the exact number customized by the user
  . Finally, importing
  • 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
  • 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
  • Editing information is performed individual for each track
  , currently there is no existing method for users to
  • (cannot edit multiple tracks
  at a time
  • ), exposing a major efficiency disadvantage
  . However, this
  • 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
  • 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: while the importing
  • Importing feature has been designed to maximize efficiency through multiple uploads,
  we have also built in safety to
  • but it is also safe because we prevent accidental importing by allowing users to cancel the import at any time
  .
  • Hovering over a current import will bring up a "delete" button which will cease the import process and dequeue the file
  . However, once
  • Once the file finishes importing, there is no way to delete the album except through individual removal of the tracks
  , a possible
  • Possible improvement would involve an "undo import" function which effectively removes all imported music from the library
  .
• Media Playback: the playback
  • Playback control panel allows for easy adjustment of play, pause, previous, next, as well as position in the current playing song
  . From a safety standpoint, all
  • All user mistakes
  is
  • are recoverable by simply dragging the cursor back or using the playback buttons
  .
• *Editing Track Information: *editing a track is a significant task that changes its identifying features, so it is important that safety is a primary concern in our application.
  • Safety is a primary concern for editing track information
  • Double clicking on any track brings the user into the edit mode, which is made obvious by expanding the track into a view with album, genre tags, as well as individual editable fields
  . While user
  • User can directly edit each field, but the undo function is still applicable in the application, hence tolerating a certain degree of user errors
  . Furthermore, as
  • As mentioned in the "efficiency" section, we decided to disallow multi-track editing to avoid user mistakes propagating to a large number of tracks
  .
• Exporting CMJ List: the
  • The exporting view function prevents user errors by first giving users a preview of the view to be exported
  , before the user
  • User have to "confirm" and actually save the CMJ list view to disk
  .
  • At any time, if the user notices an error in the export, the "cancel" option is available to return the user back to the main KaJaM! interface.