Re: Design scenario - software player -- HCI Group Project

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Date Posted: 12:28:17 08/01/02 Thu
Author: Li
Subject: Re: Design scenario - software player
In reply to: Li 's message, "Design scenario - software player" on 09:09:05 07/29/02 Mon

Design Scenario: John uses the software that comes with the MP3 player

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.

Recently, John received a birthday present from his son Joe. It is a MP3 player named "Highly Accessible MP3" and it is advertised to be "very easy to use and specially designed for the senior citizens". It comes with a software, which helps the users to download music from the Internet, plays music on the computer, and transfer music between the computer and the player. With the help of his son Joe, John successfully installed the software and configured it. John decides to try out the software first.

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", "Transfer" 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.

Part d: transfer music to the portable player

John found that he had been so exited with the new software that he had not tried the main part of the gift - the portable MP3 player itself. He remembered that Joe showed him how to connect the device with his computer with the provided USB cable. He connected the cable, and the control center of the software automatically showed up on the screen. John wanted to transfer some of his favorite songs into the portable device such that he could listen to them while taking a walk. He found that was a "Transfer" button on the screen, so he pushed this button using the mouse. In the right part of the window, he saw the list of songs he had in his collection. At the end of each song title there was a small button "Add to player". Below this listing there was an empty area titled "Songs in the player". John selected one song in the list and pushed the "Add to player" button. Now he saw the title of that song appeared in the "Songs in the player" area. "This is easy", John thought to himself. He then transfered more songs to the player.

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