Executive Summary
Our interdisciplinary team of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) graduate students was given the task to design and prototype an in-car hard drive based jukebox for playback and manipulation of large digital music libraries. In order to understand the users and the conventions that are currently implemented in similar systems, we conducted an extensive research campaign. In this phase of the project, we performed a competitive analysis on the existing products available in the market. In parallel to this competitive research study, we completed a round of idea generation, brainstorming using affinity diagramming to compile a foundation of ideas for a jukebox designed for usability.
With a solid foundation built, we orchastrated two rounds of extensive user interviews to identify the users’ intents so that this system could be designed to optimize the features desired by its potential users. The first round consisted of users who have large digital music collections, while the second round examined commuters who listen to music in the car. From this we learned that most people interviewed use music to either define their mood, or to enhance the mood they currently are in.
Once we identified the users’ intents, we conducted early design exercises focusing on extreme use cases such as user control, simplicity, and visibility. Combining various designs resulted in an amalgamation of components that a majority of users would find valuable. In order to build upon previous ideas, each team member created design interactions to illustrate playlist manipulation, music playback, and the transfer (ripping) of music from CDs to the hard drive. The aggregate of these designs and interactions became the foundation that would comprise a complete jukebox solution.
After this design exercise, we created two interactive prototypes to test components and processes of the in-car digital music jukebox. Each of these prototypes was user tested using a tablet PC to simulate button presses and two exterior push turn knobs. After each round, we aggregated and analyzed the data, and found that simplicity was paramount to crafting highly usable designs.
In order to produce one cohesive solution to the in-car digital music, considering issues of safety, usability and desirability, we set up a driving simulator which allowed users to drive through a simulated city while using a in-car jukebox prototype. The simulator consisted of a touchscreen and push-turn knobs to display the stereo prototype, a wheel, driving pedals and a driving video game to simulate the driving context, and an eye tracker head piece to track glances. After the completion of each round, we identified the primary critical incidents and created affinity diagrams which drove the design changes following the round of testing.
With respect to our original charter, we were quite successful in designing an in-car digital music jukebox well founded in user intents, robustly refined through multiple rounds of user testing, and carefully examined for safety characteristics in an automobile context. The data shows that our design is easy to use, highly learnable, and supports a range of user values and use cases.
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