Overview of Design
This design uses Dropbox as an inspiration, and focuses on efficiently importing music to the playback library.
Storyboard
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Explanation |
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Lana energetically arrives at the music studio. After chatting with a fellow music director about some new music for a few minutes, she sits down to check her e-mail. |
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She's surprised to see an e-mail from the record label TerrorMonkey, she hasn't heard from them in months. Two of the albums strike her interest, so she uses the direct download links provided to download them to her desktop. |
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She opens up the KaJaM! interface in her browser, and drags the downloaded files onto the interface. |
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The imported zip files immediately start uploading to the playback library. A pane has risen from the bottom of the interface, showing the import progress of the albums. Lana starts filling in the artist name for one of the zipped albums. |
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Filling the artist name for the zip file automatically populates the same field for each of the album tracks. |
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Afterwards, she replaces the generically named "Track1.mp3", "Track2.mp3", "Track3.mp3" with the real track names from a web search for the album. |
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The upload has completed and Lana has filled out all required fields. A confirmation button is now available to add the album to the library. She clicks it. |
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She realizes she forgot to attach the album artwork, so she scrolls down to the "Recently Filed" section of the interface, and clicks on the attachment icon. |
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The dialog box pops up, and Lana sees that the system has already attached the cover-art automatically. The album artwork must've been included in the zip file. |
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The second album is also done uploading. She plays one of the tracks to get a feel for the new music. She loves it. |
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She looks up at the clock and realizes she is short on time. Lana has to make a radio show in thirty minutes. |
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She forwards the record label e-mail to Adam, her assistant ("elf"). She tells him to check KaJaM!, so that he can finish entering the details and add the album to the playback library. Lana leaves in a hurry to prepare for her show. |
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Later that evening, Adam receives Lana's e-mail at his home computer. Even though he's tired from his Computer Science classes that day, he doesn't mind listening to new music while filling in some album details. He finishes by approving the album into the playback library, to be played at a later date on WMBR 88.1. |
Notes: This design focuses exclusively on transferring music to the playback library.
Analysis
Learnability
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 (other than individual track names, which should always be editable immediately).
Efficiency
This design's purpose is to maximize efficiency, and the asynchronous import process and propagation of album 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 into KaJaM!, one at a time. Extracting multiple URLs from an e-mail automatically would be more efficient, but presents logistical/efficiency challenges (we need the raw HTML of the e-mail to get the links, which would require first saving the e-mail, or giving our system access to the user's inbox).
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 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.