Hey everyone, hope you had a great holiday weekend (if you’re in the US that is), and thank you again for following our adventures here at Made by Many NYC.

Last week was short, but still busy and soccer filled! We are hoping to get some user testing in this week so we spent last week preparing. We are eager to have people use our simple web application and to answer some of the questions we have. For example, after a user finishes a music listening session, what do they want to do with that information? Do they want a simple list of songs that they can listen to again (an ordinary playlist), or do they want more insightful information about their listening habits? Dana worked last week on designing some simple screens that present some of the ideas we’ve been bouncing around about how to make these playlists more engaging and interesting to the users, for more information on that, check out her blog this week!

On the other hand, I was working on making the web application a little better by making it more user friendly and adding some functionality. City is a now a path option (and it actually gives some great results, even at this early stage), the user can always see what path they are currently on, the application flow is more clear, and it is restartable. It’s not going to be our end product, so I didn’t want to spend too much time making it perfect, but on occassion some weird things would happen and I didn’t want that to interfere with the user testing experience. For example, songs with multiple artists pose an interesting problem for this simple stage — later we could certainly implement a user choice option for scenarios like this but for now, we just want to keep it simple but not confuse our user when they thought they were trying to listen to Beyoncé and end up with Lady Gaga instead. For now, I simply decided to update the displayed path so that the user knows when it has changed. Not the best solution, but certainly the quickest fix, and that’s what we’re after at this stage — getting the idea in front of people and letting them use it as quickly as possible.

We really appreciate all of your feedback and awesome tweets, please continue to feel free to reach out to us if you have any comments/advice or want to play around with our web app. I actually use it to listen to music during work quite a bit, and it’s just 30 second previews for now, I can’t wait to build the real thing! Thanks again!

‘Til Next Time,

Dory