Needfinding Part 1

We are kicking off our needfinding process with a set of questions we developed after talking with Mehran Sahami after his lecture. The purpose of these questions is to gain a broad sense of how users interact with music individually and in groups within a car.

Take our survey!

How would you share and listen to music in a car?

Mehran comes to class

Mehran came to class today and gave a great lecture on rapid prototyping. He talked about the great advantages of investing time into cheap proofs of concept before beginning to develop and deploy potential solutions to our problems. After his talk, our team decided to pick his brain a bit about how best to rapid prototype and gain insight into applying these learnings to our own project, which will take place in a group context. Do we create paper prototypes for every single person in the "car"? Do we do user testing in groups or do we stick to individuals?

User testing with paper prototypes

Mehran brought up some good points about the poor interface of listening to music in his BMW (as well as other actions). He cited the difficulty of using the knob while driving, the non-intuitiveness of turning the knob while using maps (turning right actually zooms out, contrary to most people's expectations), and the confusing nature of navigating through his music library once he plugs in his phone. To our delight, he also emphasized the frustration of not having a solution that seemed particularly accommodating to someone who should be focused entirely on the road, one of the core goals our team had settled on after our first brainstorm session.

Confusing BMW knob

Difficult to navigate music selections

We had a great discussion and decided to do a bit more brainstorming afterward to incorporate some of the things he mentioned. What if we tried harder to emulate the low-friction, low-cognitive-load and classic experience of listening to the radio? What if everyone in the car could contribute songs from their own "radio station" that users could switch between?

We ultimately decided that we will create a survey to send out to as many of our peers as we can before our liaison meeting next week in order to do some initial needfinding and gather some data before we decide how to narrow down our search.

Brainstorming and benchmarking

Our project requirements are as follows:

Design a system that can intelligently and seamlessly combine the music collections from all the mobile devices inside of the vehicle. All of the vehicle’s occupants should be able to browse and control the combined music collection.

The following can be assumed:

1. All of the music is stored locally on the phone

2. The system only needs to support a single phone platform (iOS or Android)

3. One of the phones is paired to a vehicle’s multimedia system via Bluetooth to stream the audio (using the A2DP protocol)

4. The vehicle has a Wifi hotspot that you can use for any networking, but this is not required.

The implementation of this system should consider ease of use, impact of latency, overall entertainment value, and how multiple users would interact with a shared resource. Beyond these initial requirements, you are free to implement any additional functionality that you feel would enhance the user-experience.

We met today to look into existing apps and services related to what we're trying to do and brainstorm ideas about what we want to create. Before our meeting, we each came up with a list of products and a list of potential features we envision our product having. We tried to organize existing services into a few different topics:

MUSIC TRENDS/HISTORY

• last.fm: logs listening history and shows data about long-term music preferences
• Soundwave: creates timeline from anything you listen to on Spotify or Rdio; can see users based on location
• vs. Soundtracking (deliberate, sporadic sharing), Soundwave is automatic
• Listn: combines songs from iTunes, RDio, Spotify, YouTube; share with others
• Yap: makes custom playlists based off your music likes on FB

REAL-TIME SHARING

• Rockbot: start playing a random song, users view all available songs and vote; songs play based on popularity
• MyStream: iOS devices share songs via bluetooth/wifi - create playlist and broadcast (neighbors can opt into playlist and listen along)
• Jukebox Hero: one phone is a central library hub and other devices log on as remote; uses GPS to pull jukeboxes in area
• Playmysong: just like Jukebox Hero
• Youzakk: scrapes FB accounts and foursquare location information to choose the optimal music for your location and taste profiles
• Turntable.fm: no longer exists; allowed users to take turns being DJ in virtual listening room, can up/down vote; very social
• Eavesdrop: allows streaming music from one iPhone to another

GAMES

• Smule: many games (play songs on various instruments, T-Pain app, etc.)

CARS

• BMW X1: new entertainment system will stream music from web

• CarTunes: app designed for listening to music in the car - particular emphasis on controlling the music while minimizing the distraction to the driver (allows customization)

After talking through all of the above related apps, we thought through limitations we had - time limit, man power, Audi's requirements, etc. - and brainstormed different ideas for what our eventual app might look like. We noted the things we liked and disliked about each of these services, and considered whether or not to incorporate these aspects into our own app and project goals. Ultimately, we decided on the following goals for the next 6 months:

CORE GOALS

• everyone can control the collection (e.g. turntable.fm)
• car safety (e.g. cartunes)
• Facebook login (for security and setting us up for potential stretch goals of scraping Facebook data)
• allow for keyword tags (genre/artists/titles/etc.)
• each person submits a playlist or group of songs that they're in the mood for (people might not want everyone in the car to see everything in their library)

STRETCH GOALS

• high priority: cloud-based music services in addition to locally saved music (look into listn)
• smart recommendations (scrape Facebook music likes, Twitter, etc.)
• gamification of music listening

Small Group Meeting #1

Here's a summary of the meeting with had with Jay and Noam in the beautiful Gates Loft:

• KUDOS! The teaching staff noticed that we were on top of the project launching
• We have 11 days until the Feb 4 meeting with Hercules so we should be brainstorming and benchmarking now
• Benchmarking: see what's out there (i.e. other apps that do music sharing) so we don't reinvent the wheel; balance new ideas with existing ones so we don't lose creativity
• Brainstorming: get a wide berth of potential features with justifications for why they'll work (data driven or research driven, similar to the Swedish Skype market)
• Feb 4 (liaison meeting) and Feb 6 (VC meeting) for two contrasting data points
• (try not to) feel pressured to impress the VCs
• The deliverable for the benchmarking and brainstorming phase is usually a powerpoint presentation documenting work and the rationale
• Some teams have a concrete product idea by Feb 4 whereas other teams have a more abstract glimpse of how they vaguely want to disrupt a market or extend an existing application
• Mehran will give a lecture on rapid prototyping next week Tues - we can build prototypes as soon as our idea is baked enough 
• The next 11 days are very unstructured, so we need to make sure to be proactive

We would plan to take the next two days to do some benchmarking and product brainstorming on our own. We each ought to come up with:

• a list of 3-5 products out there that do music sharing (or car music sharing) and
• a list of 3-5 features that we envision our product having with rationale for why (ideally based off of data)

Then, we could all meet up this weekend to consolidate and build up more ideas. So excited!

The beginning

Welcome to our blog! Over the next 6 months, be sure to check back to track our progress and see how our project for Audi develops. 

Meet Team Audible: 

Amanda Lin

I am finishing up my coterm in CS with a specialization in HCI. After graduating in June, I will be working full time as a PM at Spotify in NYC.

Justin Lee

I am a CS coterm interested in the applications of tech on human-human interactions within impactful industries such as education, social networks, and health. Music plays a huge part in my life.

Sanjana Rajan 

I'm a senior studying computer science and mathematics, and I have been focusing on algorithms. I have always been interested in working with cars, and did an internship in Munich with BMW last summer.