The Quantified Listener

Week 6 in review

It was an abbreviated week in the NY office due to the holiday weekend, so we used our shortened time to prepare for our first in-office user testing session for the project. The session will take place on Tuesday afternoon. In anticipation of this date, we’ve been creating a thorough plan to take best advantage of the resource of human feedback.

We figured that in order to get the most helpful answers, we should focus on asking the right questions. If you recall, last week I talked about our concerns with sustained interest in saved playlists. Since then, we’ve considered having lists act not only as a record of songs but as a record of listening data. Imagine a quantified listener, more aware of his or her listening habits.

Here are examples of data/information that we could provide about a user’s saved playlists:

• A user-inputted playlist title
• The selected songs and their order
• The frequency of the chosen “paths” (ex. a user chose to advance based on city, such as Chicago, 60% of the time)
• Duration of the playlist (time and number of songs)
• The time and date of playlist creation
• The location of playlist creation
• Subjective context of the playlist, such as mood or occasion (ex. workout, party, commute)
• The playlist’s “story arc” (?)

Our intent is to use Tuesday’s user testing session to determine what information about playlists would users be interested in engaging with. We hope to use this feedback to ensure that the playlists are solutions, too.

I have been putting together screen prototypes to show users what information might be visible on both a playlist browsing menu and a playlist viewing page. The challenge is constructing and presenting the screens in a way that will cause a user to respond to the content, not the design. At least for this first round of user interviews, we want to focus specifically on the desirability of playlist information.

Do you have any resources that might help out Dory and I get the most out of our first user testing session? Let us know!