More Metaphors
Week 7 in Review
Before TaskRabbit’s untimely pivot last week (just ask HJ how he feels about this), we used the service to grab a few users to actually use and respond to our application. We didn’t have too many user requirements— all we asked was for individuals that pay for a music subscription service (such as Spotify, Rdio), frequently listen to music on their phones, and use playlists to organize their music. We had three users come in, and putting our application in front of real! live! people! gave our process new life… and new direction.
We first sat down with each TaskRabbit-ed user and got to know their music listening habits a bit: what service(s) they used to listen to music, when they were listening, how they organized their music, and how they discovered new music. After doing so, we introduced them to our web demo of the application, and let them walk us through it. To us, this was less of a usability test and more of a desirability test, so we made sure to ask questions that reflected this.
After they clicked around the demo a bit, we asked them to comment on the attributes they were using as “paths” (artist, genre, city, year), and gave them a handful of printed slips of all the song attributes available through the Echo Nest API, a very thorough music information database that we are using to power our application. We asked them to identify paths that intrigued them, and paths that they definitely wouldn’t want to use.
We asked them to do this during the demo rather than after, in hopes that their answers would reflect the current context and experience of using the app.
After they were finished, we wanted to get input on what happened next in the transition of journeys to saved lists. This continues to be the biggest conceptual challenge of our application— so, rather than handing off this challenge to the users with open-ended questions, we encouraged them to react by presenting them with a few examples of screens:
We presented these screens on printed card stock, a little bit larger than the average phone screen size. This way, the users could hold the screens, but still understand they weren’t refined designs to be analyzed for usability.
We had about 45 minutes of conversation with each user. After completing all three sessions, Dory and I debriefed by writing out all of the users’ impressions on Post-it notes: blue Post-its for negative impressions, green Post-its for positive impressions, and pink Post-its for “wishes”— missing features or functionalities that users wanted the application to have.
Perhaps the most important takeaway for us was the users’ reaction to finished journeys. We had been working under the assumption that users would want their listening experience to stay intact as a journey, but the three users we talked to suggested otherwise. To use the language of the second user we spoke to, the journey should not function as a list, but rather as a “farming ground” for users to pull discovered songs from and add to preexisting playlists (more metaphors…).
It’s a compelling idea— and one that would really change how our application functions. It moves away from the “finite” music experience that we were originally intending to create, but it may be a solution to making the application more sustainable.
I spent the rest of the week considering alternative solutions for how a user might initially interact with a finished journey. Here’s one suggestion, which allows the user to save the journey as a list but also add selected songs to preexisting playlists:
I also spent some time working on the design of the alpha mobile app (!) which we hope to have ready for this week (!!!). That means more user testing, and based on the feedback we got after Tuesday’s sessions, I’m looking forward to that! As you might be able to tell, we’re starting to get a bit busier— and more excited. We’d love to hear your comments, questions and suggestions!
