Hey Jude… have time for a 10 minute interview?
Iterating on Prototypes and Reframing
Hi there! This publication follows the MHCI Amazon Music team as they further explore the space of music by seeking opportunities in areas besides the “in real life” (IRL) experiences. We’ll be cataloguing our sprint-by-sprint process, as well as any insights we gain along the way.
Despite everything else going on in the world right now, we are gradually adapting to a new lifestyle and maintaining our optimism through creative Zoom meeting backgrounds, pictures of our team mascot Kino 😸, and Animal Crossing.
For more information about our project, MHCI, and our team, check out our first blog post.
Insights from prototypes 1.0
After finalizing our testing protocols and running the test with ~14 participants virtually, we generated insights based on users’ responses to each prototype, leading to potential ideas for iteration.
DJ Rotation: Co-Creation
- Rediscovery of music is more often the crux of friend-to-friend co-listening/music sharing than discovery of new music.
- Music sparked deep conversation between participants. Co-listening is primarily used as an avenue to start conversations about music with others.
Brain Drain: Low-Cognition Listening
- This app is most useful when 1. people are already expecting uncontrolled music like when discovering music, 2. people are passively listening to music and treating it as ambient noise, and 3. people are in a time-crunch and it’s expensive to spend time picking their own music.
Kitty Klap: Tangible Algorithm
- The visibility of “bubbles” while seeing a song play helps users to better “design” their future experiences in the application.
- Prompting users to make a playlist based on their activity brought about more clarity than asking them to create a playlist with no prompt.
- Users liked the playlist creation process as it felt very fast and it required less cognitive load than selecting a traditional playlist.
Percent Match: Tangible Algorithm
- Two different interpretations for the percent match: “how well this playlist matches their personal music listening history” vs. “how much they will like this playlist.”
- The interpretation impacts users’ willingness to trust the recommendation.
- Current metrics fail to capture the more nuanced difference between individual songs.
Understanding our progress through insight mapping
Before jumping into prototyping 2.0, our team created an insight map that captured significant findings spanning from the start of our project until now. The intention was to retread spaces we had uncovered previously but had not explored deeply, and to implement these important solution spaces in our next round of prototyping. The insight map led to five distinct areas that the team focused on for this week’s prototyping:
- Tangible Algorithm & Co-Creation
- Tangible Algorithm & Live User Control
- Furthering Music Intimacy
- Ownership in Modern Music Listening
- Music Era’s: Playlist of My Life
Ideating — ft. prototypes 2.0
Based on the insight map and feedback from testing, we generated another round of prototypes for the five areas.
Co-Creation Station: Tangible Algorithm & Co-Creation
The Co-Creation Station further explores the space of tangible algorithms and group curation by introducing a collaborative version of Kitty Klap from last round.
Adjustable Algorithm: Tangible Algorithm
Building off of user feedback from the first round of Tangible Algorithm prototypes, Adjustable Algorithm provides users the ability to adjust their algorithm and visualize how these changes impact their music recommendations.
Trading Cards: Tangible Algorithm & Intimacy
Trading Cards aims to create a sense of ownership over users’ music in a streaming-centric world by altering and sharing individual recommendation algorithm “cards.”
My Music Space: Ownership
My Music Space provides users with the capability to customize their music library, make edits to public playlists as well as a stronger connection with artists. We see this prototype as an interactive storyboard to further discover the potential solution space related to music ownership.
Time Machine: The Playlist of My Life
Both our own primary research as well as the research we received courtesy of Amazon Music highlighted the concept of creating playlists for eras of a listener’s life. This prototype is a beginning look at “re”-exploration or “re”-discovery of music.
Moving forward, we will conduct testing for the five prototypes and synthesize the findings to inform our research direction for the summer semester.
Snapshots from life in social distancing
“Spending time alone has me reading more and rediscovering some old favorites, like this gem I picked up from the Strand years ago” — Rissa.
“Multi-tasking = YouTubing + Kino-ing + Animal Crossing” — Olivia.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more updates from our team! 💖🎵👏
