...
- Record a melody line.
- Change one of the notes in your melody.
- Add a harmony line.
- Export the song.
Observations
first design:
obvious selection of notes
time marking on track
representation of multiple tracks
"cut track" is confusing
clicked on back to add harmony
feedback for saving / afraid to lose changes
piano mode
piano icon confusing
copy song / save as
revised design:
"it's an eye?"
"this is clearly volume"
opened song to export
"export is tiny"
Josh tapped on the layer buttons for a while before Record
used Undo to "change a note"
tried to drag a rectangle on the screen to select notes
should we make tapping on whitespace create new notes?
should we make dragging select multiple notes? vertical/horizontal?
recorded over layer before figuring out how to add harmony
should make "exit" say "menu" or something?
obvious selection of notes
time marking on track
representation of multiple tracks
"cut track" is confusing
clicked on back to add harmony
feedback for saving / afraid to lose changes
piano mode
piano icon confusing
copy song / save as
"it's an eye?"
"this is clearly volume"
opened song to export
"export is tiny"
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 we replaced that with a layers metaphor where there are exactly four tracks, and they're overlaid on top of each other on the screen.