Today, we had a Breakathon in class, where we paired with "The Ultimate Coding Machine" (the BMW team) and got to see them explore the current Audible application. This was overall a really fun and informative experience - we exposed bugs that we never knew about, saw how real users interacted with the different screens, and got a lot of good feedback about our design and programming decisions.
We came into the Breakathon with a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish (you can see our planning/instructions worksheet here) and this really helped us to get lots of organized and thorough feedback. We started by giving the team no instructions, so we could see how intuitive the app was to navigate. We were happy to see that without any confusion, the "driver" created a group, everyone joined the group, and they all worked together to create a queue and play songs through the driver's phone.
However, while the basic functionality of the app ran pretty smoothly, we got a lot of feedback about the process.
Here are some notes that I took about each aspect of the app while the team tested:
Group creation
- this should more graphic and interactive role choosing screen. A slider?
- passengers should be able to see existing groups in your area
- it should be clear who is in your group, and the group creator should be allowed to kick people out
- notifications about adding + removing people from the group
- have a “cancel” button on the group name screen
Universal Library
- what if when you tap a song, you have to tap to add to queue, and then when you hold down your finger, then you get a menu of other things to do (i.e. “add to front of queue”)
- name it something else
- enable searching & an a-z slider
- tag songs by their owners
Play Queue
- race conditions
- don’t like the slider
- who submitted the songs is important and should be evident
- maybe if there are 20+ songs in the queue, we don’t need to see all of them, just the next 5-10
- be able to reorder the queue, but only one person should be able to
- pausing & removing?
- when you turn the phone sideways, things don’t center
Autogeneration Tab
- “have an ADD ALL” button, the + is too ambiguous
- adding a bunch of autogen songs should wipe out the existing queue
General
- tutorial or help button
- a home screen that says “Welcome to Audible” or something
- back and forward buttons (be consistent about them)
- instead of cover art, have an indication about who added
- don’t need to have the slider
After this more general round of testing, we did a more thorough "Bug Hunt" where we tried to perform slightly unusual actions on the app (ex. two passengers clicking the same song at once) to see whether any race conditions or unexpected behaviors were evident. This was one of the most productive parts of the Breakathon, and we are planning to make a lot of improvements in the next week based on this feedback.
My bug hunt notes:
- the cover art changes randomly when clicking the songs in the universal library multiple times
- when you tap a song 14+ times in the universal library, it disappears?!
- if you switch back and forth between the driver and passenger roles, sometimes the passenger's phone will play the song out of the phone (something that should only happen on the driver's phone)
- a lot of times, songs don’t get added to the queue if you add other songs right after in short succession
- if you are on the host queue and it empties, and someone else adds a song to it, it doesn’t play on the host phone unless you move back and forth between screens
So, while we have a lot to be proud of, we definitely have a lot to work on in the next few days before we launch Audible for the first time!
