Contextual Inquiry and 1st Rough Sketches

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1 1 Jaime Espinoza Sheena Kapur Adam Nelson Jamie Pell Contextual Inquiry and 1st Rough Sketches Title Tuned We chose this title based on our interest in making sharing easy, creating communities of followers who stay tuned to people they like, and creating a place where people can find tunes they enjoy together. The Team Jaime Espinoza: User Testing/Design Sheena Kapur: Manager/Design Adam Nelson: Documentation/Development Jamie Pell: Development/User Testing Problem and Solution Overview Our goal is to make sharing and discovering music easy. While there are already plenty of ways to search for and discover music, no single solution exists that is easy, cohesive, and sufficiently mobile. Tuned is our proposal for a social networking application that allows users to upload and share music, to follow other users and see a feed of their shared music, to discover new music through search and suggestions, and to listen to and purchase music through a simple, unified interface. Users can post music to their profiles, and each post will appear on their followers feeds. Their followers can then click on a post and listen to the song straight from the application. It would combine many existing music sharing resources, as well as some new ideas, into one unified system. 1

2 2 Contextual Inquiry Subjects Profile #1 - Sheena s interviewee: Gender: Male Age: 21 Location: University District, his apartment, Seattle Occupation: Student (CSE major) Status: Describes his relationship with music as intimate. Has a core library of music he listens to with his favorite artists but will also go out looking for new music (especially electronic music). Reason for Interview: To get a student s perspective Profile #2 - Claire - The young professional: Gender: Female Age: 23 Location: Seattle Occupation: Works at the downtown Seattle Public Library Status: UW grad. Listens to music on the go such as buses, bus stops, and car radio. Reason for Interview: To understand a young female professional s perspective Profile #3 - Danny - Local rock band (Hidden History) vocalist and guitarist: Gender: Male Age: 24 Location: Seattle Occupation: UW student Status: Plays in a local rock band with Christian undertones. Is passionate about making and listening to music, and is always looking to build his fan base as well as keep up with the evolution of music. Reason for Interview: To get an artist s perspective on music sharing and discovery Profile #4 - Nate: Gender: Male Age: 29 Location: 2nd Avenue Records, Portland, OR Occupation: Advertising Status: Serious music fan; very knowledgeable. Reason for interview: To understand the current habits of a possible customer 2

3 3 Profile #5 (Interview only) - musician (anonymous): Gender: Male Age: 34 Occupation: Musician (guitarist, composer, producer) Knowledge of music: Extremely knowledgeable Location of interview: Online (Trondheim, Norway and Seattle) Reason for interview: To understand an artist's perspective Contextual Inquiry Results We conducted four contextual inquiries and one long distance interview. The common themes across all four inquiries were that users enjoy listening to music from their phones and computers, desire the ability to share music easily, like discovering new music, and enjoy downloading music. Although there are ways to do all of these tasks, there is no simple, unified solution currently available. Our first contextual inquiry participant (anonymous) showed a strong desire for a platform to share music. He stated that, while many applications exist for listening to internet radio (Pandora, figure A3 and A4), collecting music (itunes, figure A1), cataloging/listening to music (rdio.com, figure A5), and discovering music (hypem.com, figure A6), there is still no dedicated platform for music sharing. He also expressed that he likes to listen to, categorize, and download music. Even though he likes other music applications as listed above, he has some problems with those applications as well. He claimed that on rdio.com (Figure A5) users can only listen to music for a limited time and then need to buy a memebership, which he didn t like. Furthermore, hypem.com (figure A6) is more of a music discovery tool than a music player. This means that a user can t listen to full albums. Beyond that, the participant stated that he did not like Pandora s (figure A3 and A4) advertisements. However, as stated before, his main complaint about the music applications he already uses is that there is no platform dedicated to music sharing. Drawing from conversations with the next two participants (profile #4 and #5), we concluded that their two most significant areas of interest were concert/touring information and the ability to purchase music from the app. Nate expressed that he was very interested in concerts and likes to attend local shows whenever possible, and that he keeps himself informed about tour information by following bands on Facebook or Twitter or their home pages, and keeping up to date with local venue schedules. He said that he can usually stay pretty well informed this way, but that it is a bit of a tedious process. Nate is very savvy when it comes to staying informed about tours compared to most people, so for the average person we imagine it would be very easy to miss a concert entirely, based on what Nate told us about his experience. He also expressed an interest in having the ability to purchase music easily. He said that he tries to buy physical CDs (mostly from the record store where 3

4 4 the interview took place see figures A7 A9) whenever possible, but sometimes the music he likes is not easy to find. He has strong beliefs against piracy, so being able to obtain music through legal means is important to him. The musician we interviewed said that playing live shows is one of the most significant ways that his band finds new fans, so it is very important for him that music fans stay informed of upcoming events. Like Nate, he seemed interested in making it easy for fans to buy music; he then described why it is important to him that fans obtain his work legally. Even for bands like his that are internationally recognized, if a band is not wildly successful and famous it is difficult to make enough money to support oneself just through album and ticket sales. The more illegal downloading there is, the harder it is for these bands to continue doing what they do. Claire (profile #2) listens to music on the bus (see figure A10) from her ipod or laptop. She currently uses YouTube to find songs, itunes to buy them, and Pandora to discover them. However, she often hears about music from her peers or from public sources such as TV episode soundtracks, playlists at bars, and the radio. She does not use Spotify specifically because she doesn t want it posting to Facebook for everyone to see everything she is listening to; her music is sometimes private to her. To share music, she usually tells her friends verbally but sometimes posts YouTube links to friends Facebook walls. She only actively searches for music in her free time. Claire s biggest interest was in having good music find her, such as from co workers, friends, and family. If she is interested in a song she will YouTube it to test whether she likes it enough to buy it on her itunes and then she will add it to her ipod. She refrains from pirating music, and will only accept free music if her peers give it to her. As the head, guitarist, and vocalist of his local rock band, Danny (profile #3) is very passionate about making music. His motivation is self expression and obtaining income from his music. He listens to music all the time via his smartphone, car, computer and live shows. He avidly seeks new music as a source of inspiration, and to track the progression of music. He uses Grooveshark, Pandora, and friends to discover new music because they have a wide base of variety and artists. When listening he studies the structure, transitions, tones, etc. to learn new things. He shares rough tracks with his family, and friends and other bands to receive critiques on his style. He does this via YouTube, Facebook and . He makes calls to venues to try to schedule shows, and he uses social media to build his fan base. His band (figure A11) tries to create short albums of 3 4 songs at a higher frequency than the traditional method of 12 track albums every several months. He buys music from itunes in order to support other artists like himself. 4

5 5 Figure A1: Participant demonstrating how he collects and categorizes music Figure A2: Participant demonstrating a mobile application for music listening Figure A3: Participant logging into Pandora Figure A4: Participant demonstrating his categories of radio stations on Pandora Figure A5: Participant demonstrating how he listens to music on rdio.com Figure A6: Participant demonstrating how he discovers music on hypem.com 5

6 6 Figure A8: Inside the record store. Figure A7: Outside the 2nd Avenue record store, where Jamie interviewed Nate. Figure A9: More merchandise, records and T-shirts. 6

7 7 Figure A10: Claire listening to music at the bus stop. (image permission granted) Figure A11: Danny playing in his band (image permission granted) 7

8 8 New and Existing Tasks The three tasks outlined below are all existing tasks that can be performed through other applications. However, we plan to combine then in a new way in the application. Task 1: Listening to a song (frequency: high, importance: high, complexity: low) Details: Adam wants to find and listen to I am the Walrus by The Beatles. Process: 1. Log in (if not logged in already) 2. Select the Search page or search bar 3. Search for i am the walrus or any other relevant term(s) 4. Click the song in the search results, and it will begin playing Compare and Contrast: Currently, listening to music is a very fragmented task. Most users listen to music through a large variety of mutually incompatible sources: physical media, online stores such as itunes or Amazon, YouTube, internet radio, and listening sites such as Spotify or Grooveshark, among others. Listening to music through any of these sources is usually a one or two step process, but switching between providers or determining which provider has a given song can be cumbersome. In the case of a popular artist like The Beatles, most music sources would have this song; but, when the song in question is either very obscure or popular enough to have many copyright restrictions, finding it becomes harder. A quick search for i am the walrus the beatles on GrooveShark, for example, turns up dozens of covers but not the original. Our application will simplify the task of finding music by supporting listening straight from the app: any song shared by another user, whether in a feed or search result, can be clicked and played instantly. Whether this will be through an embedded player or a link to a web based player on another site (YouTube, etc.) has not yet been determined. 8

9 9 Task 2: Following a User (frequency: medium, importance: medium, complexity: medium) Details: Jamie sees that the user ferrous91 is always finding cool new metal music, and wants to follow him. Process: 1. Log in (if not logged in already) 2. Select the Search page or search bar 3. Search for ferrous91 4. Follow the user Compare and Contrast: This task is the hook of our application, the part that makes it different from other music sharing solutions. Following users is a common task on social networking sites (Twitter, Google+), but, in Tuned, it provides a feed of shared music suggestions rather than status posts. Users like ferrous91 are likely to be a better source of music suggestions than the search and similarity algorithms used by other music applications. The process of finding users to follow will be similar to such processes on sites like Twitter: users can search for other users specifically, can see who those users are following, and can see when others begin following them. Task 3: Sharing a Song (frequency: medium, importance: high, complexity: high) Details: Jaime just discovered the song The Feeling by The Knocks and wants to share it with his friends. Process: 1. Log in (if not logged in already) 2. Navigate to the Share Music page 3. Paste/input a link to The Feeling from a music site 4. Post the song link 9

10 10 Compare and Contrast: Sharing music is a common task on social networking platforms like Facebook. Although most social networking sites do not have any specialized way of sharing music, users typically share music by posting a link in a status update or tweet, usually to a YouTube video. Some applications, such as Spotify or the Last.fm Scrobbler, also automatically share users recently listened to tracks with social networking services. Tuned improves on this with a dedicated music sharing system. The task of sharing music remains the same for users: they simply copy and paste a link, possibly with comments or extra information about the song, and it is published to their followers news feeds. 10

11 11 Sketches (composed before final title determined) Of all the sketches we put together, we chose these four to represent the sum of our work. We felt that these sketches gave us the greatest design variety and a substantial base to expand upon. We want to have rough ideas of both the mobile (primary) and web interfaces moving forward. The other sketches we worked on gave us good ideas as well, and we may continue to refer to them in the future, but we feel that these four are the most promising. Figure B1: Sketch of possible web interface design. 11

12 12 Figure B2: Sketch of the mobile Search interface. Figure B3: Sketch of the mobile Playlist interface. 12

13 13 Figure B4: Sketch of the mobile feed interface. 13

Vertical Music Discovery

Vertical Music Discovery Robert Fearon, Emmerich Anklam, Jorge Pozas Trevino Value Proposition With this project, we aim to provide a fun, easy-to-use mobile app for casual, vertical music discovery. Team