Our need-finding survey results helped us refine our brainstorming to the most important needs of our audience:
1) The app should be as low friction/as hands-free as possible
This led us to design our initial prototype with very few gestures and buttons - making it possible for music to start playing with just one click.
2) The app should be collaborative
To satisfy this need, our initial prototype contains a "universal library" - a combination of the music from everyone in the car from which music is selected. Additionally, everyone in the car has the same amount of influence on the music selection.
3) Everyone should be able to influence song selection, but not have to pick every song that plays
This led us to design a "queue" and up/down voting system, where every person can put songs into a queue and then vote on whether they should be played soon.
4) Both passive and active listening should be possible
To accommodate both of these listening styles, we designed both the option to automatically populate the queue based on genre/mood/theme (passive listening) and the option to manually add songs (active listening).
Putting all of this together, we constructed our first paper prototypes of the Audible application!
This initial prototype has three main screens: "Universal Library", "Queue", and "Auto-Generate". The "Universal Library" screen is the combined collection of music from everybody in the car, that everyone can search through and select songs from. These selected songs will be listed on the "Queue" screen, which shows what is going to be played next in the car. It also includes an up/down voting system, which moves songs up or down in the queue based on how many people want to listen to them.
The "Auto-Generate" screen offers a quick way to populate the song queue with songs centered around a particular theme, mood, or genre. Users can either pick a popular playlist (i.e. "Energize") or search for a specific tag.
After developing these low-fidelity prototypes, we did our first round of user testing to get some feedback on our design. We wanted to see what was intuitive, what was confusing, and whether users could navigate the application to use all of the included features. Because our application is targeted to Audi's younger market (the "young urban professional") we thought that Stanford students might be a good starting point.
We got a lot of useful feedback from our first group of user testers!
Some positive feedback included:
Overall, we think that we are on the right track, but definitely have lots of feedback to consider when developing our next iterations of the prototype. Next up, you'll hear about our meeting with Audi liason Jake Hercules!
1) The app should be as low friction/as hands-free as possible
This led us to design our initial prototype with very few gestures and buttons - making it possible for music to start playing with just one click.
2) The app should be collaborative
To satisfy this need, our initial prototype contains a "universal library" - a combination of the music from everyone in the car from which music is selected. Additionally, everyone in the car has the same amount of influence on the music selection.
3) Everyone should be able to influence song selection, but not have to pick every song that plays
This led us to design a "queue" and up/down voting system, where every person can put songs into a queue and then vote on whether they should be played soon.
4) Both passive and active listening should be possible
To accommodate both of these listening styles, we designed both the option to automatically populate the queue based on genre/mood/theme (passive listening) and the option to manually add songs (active listening).
Putting all of this together, we constructed our first paper prototypes of the Audible application!
This initial prototype has three main screens: "Universal Library", "Queue", and "Auto-Generate". The "Universal Library" screen is the combined collection of music from everybody in the car, that everyone can search through and select songs from. These selected songs will be listed on the "Queue" screen, which shows what is going to be played next in the car. It also includes an up/down voting system, which moves songs up or down in the queue based on how many people want to listen to them.
After developing these low-fidelity prototypes, we did our first round of user testing to get some feedback on our design. We wanted to see what was intuitive, what was confusing, and whether users could navigate the application to use all of the included features. Because our application is targeted to Audi's younger market (the "young urban professional") we thought that Stanford students might be a good starting point.
We got a lot of useful feedback from our first group of user testers!
Some positive feedback included:
- "I like that I can get music to start playing after just one click"
- "If I press something it gets highlighted, that's good. Otherwise I wouldn't be sure if it worked"
- "I like that you can see the scores of each song! It makes it kind of like a game."
- "Depending on my mood, I either like to choose my own music and listen to a specific song or just let something else do the choosing, so I like that this app lets me do both."
Some aspects of the app that our users found confusing included:
- "Why are there next/previous buttons? Who controls them?"
- "Who can change the volume? Anyone? Because that wouldn't make sense, right?"
- "The tag thing doesn't really make sense to me. I wouldn't expect something to just start playing when I pressed a tag."
- "What happens if multiple people pick autogeneration tags simultaneously?"
Overall, we think that we are on the right track, but definitely have lots of feedback to consider when developing our next iterations of the prototype. Next up, you'll hear about our meeting with Audi liason Jake Hercules!
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