Design rationale and process
The main concepts listed above are all derived from our digital music research as part of the first tier in our strategy -- understanding our user’s intents in interacting with their music. Contextual interviews of digital music users and commuters who listen to the car stereo revealed nine main intents regarding their interactions with digital music and/or the radio (See Figure 1). The “Add to Playlist” functionality was later simplified and combined with the “Favorites” functionality for in-car use.
Figure 1: Design concepts and paradigms support user items.
These intents were used directly to inform designs and functionality, which in turn support these intents - this corresponds to the second tier of our project strategy. The matrix in Figure 1 illustrates which intents are addressed by which concepts / paradigms. A more detailed discussion of elicitation of user intents from data and the process of mapping intents to design concepts are given in the
Initial Design Section.
Once we had developed these intent-based concepts as our starting point, the designs were refined through an extensive process of idea generation, rapid low-fidelity prototyping, consolidation and later with think-aloud user testing utilizing high fidelity Flash prototypes. This process supported the third tier in our project strategy: Iteratively refine designs to optimize usability, desirability, and safety. This convergent process is illustrated graphically in Figure 2 via an evolving history of our intermediate designs. The net result is our final design, the main concepts of which are discussed in
Key Concepts / Paradigms section.
Figure 2: Evolution from research to ideas to designs to prototypes.
