By Oliver Greive, M.S. HCI/d Student at Indiana University Bloomington
Header Image Source: Wes Hicks via Unsplash
This past week, I presented the first pin up presentation for my project on the UX of Music Technologies. For this presentation, I outlined this project's goals, stakeholders, exemplars, methods, components and preliminary concepts. Finally, I showed two competing mental models to help guide the next steps of my research and design process.
I also received some helpful comments from my colleagues. In this blog post, I'll make sense of this feedback and share how it's guiding my next steps with this project.
The full pinup presentation created in Miro.
First, my colleague Shriyash agreed with the notion that activities like music-making aren't linear, and are better represented by a system-based model. This is consistent with verbal feedback I received, which was helpful for me as I make sense of this overall domain.
Next, Johnny suggested I reach out to students at the Jacob's School of Music at Indiana University to conduct co-design or observational research sessions. This is a great idea, and helpful push in the right direction in terms of user research with domain experts.
Payoshni's comment helped me think about my own assumptions going in to this project: there's no avoiding that every user will have their own set of expectations based on their prior experience. There's an interesting consideration addressing different learning curves based on the users' respective instruments. This may be a useful question to address in interviews and observation or co-design sessions. It would be very interesting to find commonalities among different types of musicians (e.g. different types of proficiency between percussionists vs. vocalists).
