Design scenario - software player -- HCI Group Project

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Date Posted: 09:09:05 07/29/02 Mon
Author: Li
Subject: Design scenario - software player

Background of John

John is 60 year old male. He is fairly active and possesses a small but standard assortment of personal electronic equipment including a cell phone, a palm pilot and a CD Walkman. He also owns home stereo and car stereo systems, and listens to music a lot. He's quite comfortable with the computer and surfs the Internet quite often. Although retired, John is still a columnist for Oregonian, and he's also writing a book. John has a 25-year-old son named Joe. Joe lives close by and they meet regularly.

Problem scenario: John listens to music while working

John uses his computer a lot for writing, and he also surfs the web a lot searching for materials. He always wants to listen to music while working on his computer. His home stereo is not placed in his computer room, so he used to listen to CDs from his computer. He likes the feature that the music starts playing automatically when the CD is inserted into the CD-ROM drive, but he has to double click the Windows CD Player bar to forward the CD to skip some songs that he doesn't like. Besides, when he has to use the CD-ROM drive for other functions, he has to stop playing music and take the CD out, which makes him feel very inconvenient.

John heard about Internet radio from the news and wondered if it was a better way to listen to music. He visited the Internet radio site provided by Yahoo, and then spent several minutes finding out how to "turn on" the radio. After waiting for half a minute, the radio started working. It was not so hard to use, but the quality is not so good and sometimes a song broke now and then with the window showing a message "buffering". The music also paused when John was surfing other sites while listening. Besides, it is hard to switch to another station. John decided to give up.

John's son visited him that weekend and John told him about that. John's son, Joe, a 25-year-old young man, suggested that John could try to download MP3 music, which had much higher quality than online radio. Joe also showed his father how to search for MP3 files from the Internet using search engines, how to download them, how to save them in the hard disk, and how to play them using Microsoft Media Player. John agreed that the quality was good, but he thought the whole procedure was too complicated. He wondered why there was not an easy way to listen to good music on his computer.

Design Scenario: John plays MP3 music on his computer

John uses his computer a lot for writing, and he also surfs the web a lot searching for materials. He always wants to listen to music while working on his computer.

From some online advertisement, John noticed new software named "Highly Accessible MP3 Player", which is claimed to be very easy to use and play high-quality music. John downloaded the software, and with the help of his son Joe, he successfully installed and configured it.

Part a: download music

When John started Windows, there was a small music symbol icon on the lower-right corner of the screen, just beside the MSN messenger icon. John guessed that he could use it the same way as MSN messenger. He right clicked on the music symbol, and found the menu "Play", "Download", "Control Center", and "Exit". He tried clicking on "Play", and a window popped up, with the message "Sorry, you don't have any song in your album collection. Do you want to download some songs?", and the buttons "download now" and "cancel". John clicked on "download now", and he saw a window very similar to Internet Explorer, but on the left part there was a table saying "my collection" has two albums: "My favorite", "Downloaded" and "Downloading", but both of them had 0 songs. On the right (and larger) part of the window, John saw something similar to the Yahoo! web page, it had a search box for searching songs, and a list of web sites for downloading songs, sorted by categories. John clicked on one of the links and was led to a site with song titles and download buttons. He clicked to download one song, and found in the "collections" area, the "Downloading" album now has 1 song. John went on and selected several more songs, closed that window, and right clicked on the music icon and selected "play". A message came out, saying "Downloading songs now. Please wait for 20 minutes, and start playing." John went back to work, and 20 minutes later, he clicked "play" again, now the first song he selected started playing. Using the same method, John downloaded more songs from the Internet. He found all titles are kept in the "Downloading" album while downloading, and moved to the "Downloaded" album after download is finished.

Part b: listen to music

Now every time John turns on his computer, the small music icon appears in the corner and the computer automatically starts playing the downloaded songs. John need not even bother putting the CD into the CD-ROM drive. When he does not want to listen any longer, he just right-click the icon and select "stop". If he wants to listen again, he can right-click again, and the word "stop" in the menu has been replaced by "play". What John has to do is just select "play" and enjoy the music.

Part c: organize albums

When John has more and more songs in his "Downloaded" album, he found that the player always plays the songs in the order that he downloaded them. He was confused and decided to try out the function he had never tried - "Control Center". A window popes up, with the buttons "Download", "Play", "Organize" and "Help" on the left part. John has used "Download" before, so he clicks on "Play". In the right area of the window, he saw something very similar to the Windows CD Player, it has buttons for play, pause, forward, etc., and shows artist names and song titles. Then John tried the "Organize" button. This time, in the main part of the window there appears a table entitled "My Collection". The columns are "Album", "Artist", and "Number of Songs". There are three rows: "My favorite", "Downloaded", and "Downloading". He found there were 30 songs in "Downloaded" and 0 in the other two albums. John clicked on the name "Downloaded", and a drop-down list appeared showing all song titles, artists, and download time. John did not know what to do now, so he studied the window again, and found several buttons at the bottom of the window: "make new album", "set as default", and "help". He clicked on "help", and a yellow note appears, with text explaining how to use the "Organize" function. Following the instructions, he dragged his favorite songs to the "My Favorite" album, and made a new album named "Piano", and dragged all the piano pieces to that new album. He also learned from the instruction that the default album to play is the "Downloaded" album, so he used the "set as default" button the set the "My Favorites" album as the default one, and selected "random playing". Now every time Windows starts, the computer plays songs from his favorite selections at random.

Claims
Design feature Pros(+) or Cons(-)

1. Player in software

(+) plays music in computers, good for people who works in a computer
(+) much lower cost than hardware players
(+) can use the resources from the computer, such as storage, audio output, and internet connection
(-) but must turn on the computer to play music, not portable
(-) software needs installation and configuration, needs certain computer skills

2. Music download function

(+) easy to use, the user need not use another software to find and download music
(+) downloaded music is put directly in the albums, easy for the user to organize MP3 files
(-) but there may be legal concerns about copyright
(-) but must update the links often, or else they may lead to dead pages, or new MP3 pages are not included
(-) but must include network connection part in configuration

3. Music organize function
(+) the user can locate songs more easily
(+) the user can keep a favorite play list
(-) but may require the user to be very familiar with Windows drag-and-drop mechanism, or read the instructions carefully

4. Simple interface
(+) easy to use, easy to learn
(-) but does not include some functionalities, because they may make the interface more complex
(-) but not flexible, many parameters are fixed after configuration, such as the directory to store all MP3 files

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Replies:

Re: Design scenario - software player -- Li, 12:28:17 08/01/02 Thu