Summertime and the livin’ ain’t so easy
We’d like to pause to acknowledge everything that has been going on during the past week in the US. The murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department has sparked a renewed wave of protests and action around police brutality, systemic racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Being in a professional/academic workspace, we often feel the pressure to maintain professionalism and not discuss topics which might be political or divisive. However, it is our duty as designers to understand the injustices of the world and to practice empathy for those who are oppressed. Our hearts are with the black and brown people in this country for whom this is not just a trending topic or news article, but a daily struggle.
As individuals, several of our teammates have been deeply affected by the events of the past week, and have acknowledged that we’ve lost hours of sleep and productivity to scrolling through social media and news. As a team, we’ve made sure to save space for us to discuss openly about how we’re dealing with and responding to these events and that has been very helpful. We’re also grateful to the MHCI cohort for creating a space where we can have these discussions more publicly. Lastly, as a team we decided to take a weekend with no meetings or assigned tasks as a mental health break to give ourselves a chance to process, decompress, and return with renewed vigor.
To recap last episode…
Coming out of spring semester, the Amazon Music team had our sights on three opportunities: 1) to offer music listeners a way to get the right music, right now through algorithm tangibility, 2) to design a mechanism to own and express their music identity on streaming platforms, 3) to provide on-platform means for meaningful peer-to-peer connections and meaningful artist-to-listener connections. Now we’re on the other side and this summer is shaping up to be one to remember.
Aligning on a common goal for our project is easier said than done
We started our summer with the notion that we could find an elegant solution that could address all three opportunities. When each member of the team came together, however, we realized that we were on different pages about what that single solution was.
While we still had a lot more questions than answers about our solution space, two things became clear: whatever solution we create must address a T-shaped problem space for a T-shaped target user group.
Understanding a diverse user base: Pretotype mental model of algorithms
If we as a team wanted algorithm tangibility as the foundation of our designs, we knew we needed to step out of our own perspectives — hard. Five graduate level students studying in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon are most definitely not a generalizable user group. We needed to understand the general public’s mental models of music recommendation algorithms. Really, the major takeaway for our team is that a singular cohesive view of algorithms doesn’t exist. Among the general public algorithms are paradoxically both too personal yet too impersonal, both tightly knit to everything you do yet uncontrollable and out of reach.
Grounding our ideas in something real: Core user flows
Designing algorithm ownership meant, in part, creating a new mental model for music listeners or their recommendation engine. As a team we decided to prioritize designing lo-fi user flows for the following two broad categories: creating an algorithm and browsing for an algorithm. The following highlight some of our major takeaways from user testing the creation flows.
- Users enjoyed the control metrics, but there emerged general confusion and issues
- Users preferred advanced view
- Card creation through keyword generation was unclear
- Value of Algorithm Cards over familiar formats (playlists, etc) is unclear
Being creative and open early on: Ideation activities
In addition to planning user flows, our team also dedicated some time to exercise our ability to come up with new ideas and thoughtful discussion. The following are a sneak peek into some of the weirder things we’ve been working on.
Next steps…
As a team our next steps will be to continue iterating on our current flows based on the insights and opportunities synthesized from user testing as well as work on a VUI implementation of the core functions of our idea. Lastly, we plan on making mental health breaks more frequent, giving ourselves the room to look after ourselves, and being mindful of the hardships to come as compassionate individuals.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more updates from our team.
