User Analysis:
Music students lead very busy lives: going to class, working to support themselves, and performing and attending other performances. One student, enrolled at Tufts and the New England Conservatory, spends a lot of time commuting between the two schools. Another student is very conscious of paying for his education. Many students attend shows several times each week as part of their education. Like all college students, they struggle to balance their time to meet all of their commitments and lead healthy lives.
These students all have short periods of downtime throughout their day: during their commutes, free time at work or during gigs, and waiting for shows to start. They can be thinking of their assignments, but due to the environments, they cannot easily compose if they think of phrases. However, if they do not write it down, they risk losing that idea. Their busy lives confine their productive creative processes to time when they are sitting at their computer or a desk with a pen and staff paper.
We will focus on developing for college students studying music. We assume they own an Android smart phone.
Task Analysis:
- Compose Music Sketches
- Select meter and pitch of the phrase
- Divide into measures
- Place notes on a staff (choose which staff)
- Modify notes with sharps, flats, accents, note length, ties, slurs
- Add dynamic and expression markings
- Sketches Play Back to User
- Play each note as it is placed on the staff so the user can make sure they are accurately transcribing the phrase. (We will assume that the user has headphones they can use if they are in a noisy environment and want to use this feature. This is a safe assumption because most people use their phones as their music players, too.)
- Unlike a piece of paper, the app can play back the phrase to remind the user of the sound and help them resume their train of thought about the phrase when they come back to it.
- Browse the Saved Files on the Phone
- Create a new file
- View the file names the user has stored on the phone
- Select a file to view again, brings up in main view
TA Feedback.
As we discussed in our meeting, this project in this submission is not a stretch at all. Make sure you focus on something that's not just for MIT students, and that isn't just a layer over a database.
Your user analysis starts with demographics, which is kind of a backwards way of thinking about users, as we discussed in the meeting. However, it's commendable that you broke up your analysis of users by role, rather than just by characteristics.
Besides thinking about your users more holistically, and as people who have problems you're trying to solve, please also flesh out your tasks. There's very little information there, and you'll be working off this document for the whole rest of the project, so it's important to have this in writing.
A few smaller changes: try to make your group wiki less informal, please also change your group name to something consistent with the project.
I'd appreciate it if you made these changes, since we'll be working off this document for the whole rest of the project.