Auracle

Editor's Notes

1. This is our basic high-level scenario: Say Troy is feeling an emotion, it could be contentment, nostalgia, or anger.We want him to be able to input that feeling into Minstrel, and for Minstrel to be able to read that emotion and play it back to him.
2. Troy has calmed down
3. We sent out a survey and got about 19 respondents, mostly pandora users but a fair share of spotify and “other” users. We mainly asked about their behavioral patterns and what was important to them in the streaming service. We generally had a mix of people who were generally content with their streaming service, with the exception of radio-centric users, who felt it could be better.
4. Weinterivewed 6 individuals about their behavior and opinions, the main topics being their:MUSIC TASTE, how they describe what they listen to and what kind of music they like,STREAMING BEHAVIOR, how they use the streaming service that they use,And MUSIC DISCOVERY, how they went about finding new music.Our main findings were that though music tastes varies from person to person, everyone started their music listening depending on a feeling or context.Going back to radio services, the automaticity and light ness of use they provided were grea, but generally lacked the playlist-centric apps had.
5. We did some competitive analysis, though much more can be done since more streaming services we didn’t know about are on the rise. Because of Minstrel’s novel nature, we wanted to make sure to grab as many existing patterns as we could so that most of the interface was familiar, like Spotify’s icon set and Pandora’s layout.There were some interesting features that we found going deeper, such as Spotify’s mood lists and Grooveshark’s drag-and-drop playlist functionality, but we didn’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole and stick to the basics where we could.
6. Began with low-level iterations in GoMockingbird, mainly just spitballing and getting features on paper.Some light A/B testing revealed that early versions (left) were a bit cluttered, clunky, and blocky and that a centralized visual helped clean things up, especially since the sliders were an ew concept and needed some adjusting to.
7. This is the final low level prototype; with sliders and controls taking dominance, but testers felt it was still lacking coherence and hierarchy.new song: indicator on slider on where we think the slider fits in.second circle to compare song to tracklistmake lines disappear until they interact with it.proto.io
8. As we started to prototype in Axure, we cycled back and forth between the high-fidelity visual concept and reorganizing items as they were emerging. These low level concepts eventually were refined into the final design.