GR3 Paper Prototyping

Prototype photos

Prototype 1

The library and playlist creation interface for the first prototype

The voting interface

Prototype 2

Library and playlist reflecting changes made due to the difficulty of users working with a tree interface.

The voting interface was mostly unchanged. Changes made were in computer response to clicking actions and no longer requiring a sliding motion to work.

Briefing

As a DJ it can be difficult to strike a balance between what the party-goers actually want to hear and what you think they want to hear. Our application attempts to solve this problem by allowing party-goers to cast votes for songs they like and dislike. These votes influence the order in which the songs are played. Thus the popular songs, as determined by the actually party-goers, rise to the top and are played first.

The DJ must be familiar with the concepts of a digital music library and a playlist. A digital music library is simply a collection of music audio files stored on a computer. A playlist, in its most general form, is simply a list of songs.

Scenario Tasks

Add Music

• Add the song "Hey Jude" by the Beatles to the library.
• Add the "Music" folder to the library

Playlist Management

• Add 3 songs from the music library to the default playlist
• Create a new playlist called "Friday"
• Change from default playlist to "Friday"

Voting

• Vote "Like" for Song 1
• Vote "Like" for Song 2 then change Song 2 back to no vote
• Vote "Dislike" for song 5(Which is offscreen)

Observations

Usability problems you discovered from the testing. Describe what users did, but don't record users' names.

First prototype (Wednesday):

• User 1 thought 'import song' would be clearer than 'add song'
• User 1 confused about purpose of detail view versus playlist view
• User 2 tried to play songs directly
• Users found party control confusing
• User 2 tired to use file menu to add songs to playlist
• All users tried to drag and drop directly from tree view of songs to playlist.
• None used the detail view pane

Second Prototype (Friday) :

• User 1 had trouble with add task until they found File menu
• Drag and drop from only a single detail pane made more sense to users.
• Users tried to create a new playlist by clicking the tab bar instead of using the file menu(Ala chrome tabs)
• All users tried to click Vote arrows instead of dragging and dropping

Prototype iteration

Because users generally found the tree view for artist/album organization redundant with a detail pane for songs, we decided to have a single details pane. Also, to ensure users are not confused by the menu options, we renamed the "Add Music to Library" to "Import Music to Library". Although we did not originally have the ability to move the song voting sliders by clicking the arrows(we wanted to have dragging only), almost all users tried clicking first. Because of this, we made the arrows clickable as well.