by Song Catcher Girl

For my last year in my masters program (HCID) we have to complete a 1 year long capstone (thesis) project. In thinking about what I might want to design, I’ve come up with the following problem space:

Local music in a digital age

When I was growing up, I was very much into local music. Back then the internet was still pretty slow but people were getting some music digitally. At the time I was doing concert photography for many local bands. I would show up at venues and photograph all day some times. This really put me deep inside the local music scene in Indianapolis. I knew most of the band members, I was friends with the sound guys, the venue owners, promoters, etc. Most people knew who I was. While part of this community I was exposed to tons of new music, both local and non-local. It was a really great experience for me.

by dusk-photography

Then digital music exploded. Piracy of music became normal and iTunes changed the music distribution system. In no small way there was a huge paradigm shift of how people consumed music. Many great things came from this. Now we can listen to music from all around the world, we have access to more music than ever, and we have this access almost all the time. However, I think something was lost in local music scenes. There was a stronger community before the digital explosion, but it shrunk or disappeared almost completely.

I think there can be a melding of the two worlds. I want to look at ways to bring local music (the community, scene, etc) into the digital age. A way for people to participate in local music scenes, listen to local music, enjoy the culture of local music, share local music, and find new local (and non-local) music.

So, over the next 9 months I will be working within this problem space. Keep an eye out on my blog for more updates as they come out. And as always, I welcome comments and critiques of any of my posts and designs.

Below are notes from my quick critique of the new iTunes Ping social network. These are in a rough form, but I thought it was important to get this out there so that people can think about and discuss these issues. I think Apple could have caught many of these issues had they done some simple user testing. This was done in a quick and dirty format and I had only briefly looked at iTunes Ping before.

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As an Experience Designer I often make things. Usually I make in order to better understand a design, or test out an idea that my team or I have had. I’ve built prototype designs using a myriad of tools including paper, foamcore, wire, photoshop, playdough, etc. Check out a project called Mirror Map to see some large prototypes made with paper, foamcore, and aluminum foil.

I’ve been wanting an iPhone dock ever since I bought an iPhone. However, I never wanted to shell out money for some boring dock to always sit on my desk. I wanted to dock my phone at times, but not in some boring white box. So, after returning home from my amazing internship at Mozilla and acquiring a new iPhone 4. I decided to make myself an iPhone dock.

For materials I used legos that I had sitting around. The base was built from a pirate themed lego package. Other supplies were used at random. I used the USB cord that came with my new phone as the connecting cord. In order to secure this cord into my lego contraption, I used some hot glue. This would allow me to dock and undock the phone using just one hand.

It works marvelously and looks super cool. Argggg!

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This summer I’ve been working at Mozilla with the Firefox UX team. My main project of the summer was to research what the hometab of the future could and should be. I was to give Firefox a useful path to traverse and provide some ideas about the design and experience of the hometab in Firefox.

In starting this project I came up with some predispositions (pre-project thoughts) on hometab, and how people use the internet. I then completed three major types of research: competitor analysis, academic research, and user research. This research led me to the following insights:

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Most of us like to share things with people that we know. This is one reason that flickr, facebook, and twitter became so popular. Sharing is huge. It’s likely that if you’ve used the internet, you have shared something with someone. Many of us share different things through many different networks. This can be quite a pain. There are many add-ons that tackle this very issue. However, the browser can make sharing easier by integrating sharing into the browser. If we know what social networks you use, by what passwords you’ve saved in Firefox, it should be pretty easy to enable sharing in Firefox.

In looking at this problem I’ve come up with the following design:

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So, I’ve been thinking a lot of process, especially about how critique fits into process both in academia and in the workplace. In academia we are constantly pushed to have our work critiqued, which is absolutely fantastic. However, what I failed to realized, despite all my preaching about getting feedback and critique as often as possible, is that in academia critique comes to you. Often times it simply wasn’t necessary to go out and explicitly ask for critique for someone. Someone was constantly around, and usually looking over your shoulder. They would just walk up and say what they thought. This is absolutely fantastic, but it’s unlike the real world which I’ve experience here at Mozilla. While we work strongly in teams, we often perform a lot of work on our own. This work happens at our own desk on our own computers. While working at our desk, everyone at the same time, it’s very unlikely that someone is just going to come up and start talking about what you are working on at that very moment. Sure people come by your desk and talk, and once in a while it’s relevant to the stuff you were working on that particular moment. But often, it’s not. This means that the work you are performing right now is being looked at by you, and likely only you. Despite our somewhat deepest fears, our colleagues are not looking over our shoulders. No one is peeping at our computers secretly judging us and see how many times we log into twitter and facebook. It’s just not happening for the majority of us, especially in our field.

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I recently got back from the Mozilla 2010 Summit in Whistler, BC.

I can sum up my entire experience in just one word.

Awesome!

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As you may know, I’ve been doing a lot of researching and thinking about post Firefox 4 Home Tab during my internship here at Mozilla. I’ve taken the research I’ve conducted, my colleagues thinking, experience and ideas, along with my own experience and ideas and put together some wireframes. These sketches represent some very basic directions that we could take with the Home Tab.

It’s important to note that these concepts represent some very basic and rough ideas of what the home tab could look like in the future. These are in no way absolute directions, but rather provide some jumping off points for future work.

That being said, let’s frame these concepts a bit better.

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Firefox is fast, no doubt about it. But for many people it feels pretty slow when starting up. Chrome, while only marginally faster than Firefox at starting, feels much faster. By analyzing videos of these start-up processes we can start to understand what makes Firefox feel slow.

First, last start with some definitions of browser start-up events.

• Before Spinner: the time from when the user clicks the application icon to when the spinner starts running.
• Spinner Running: the time while the spinner is actually running (may appear and disappear).
• Before Window Draw: the time from when the spinner stops running until the window begins drawing.
• Window Drawing: the time from when the window starts drawing until the title bar comes into view.
• Drawing Title Bar: the time it takes the title bar to come into view.
• Window Done Drawing: the time it takes for the window to draw after the title bar is seen.
• Drawing Chrome: the time it takes for the browser chrome to be drawn.
• Website Drawn: the time it takes for the entire website to be drawn (different websites used).
• Close Window: the time it takes from when a users presses the close button on the browser until when the browser is no longer shown.
• Active Icon Disappears: the time it takes from when the browser is no longer shown until the application is no longer running.
• “Fresh”: brand new profile; standard set of plugins enabled: Acrobat, Google Update, Java Deployment Toolkit, Java(TM) platofmr SE 6 U20, Microsoft Office 2010, Shockwave Flash, Silverlight, WPI Detector 1.1
• “Full”: fresh profile (only the history data used to create the 50 bookmarks below); standard set of plugins; 50 bookmarks (the 50 top alexa global sites); 5 tabs in the session (google, facebook, youtube, wikipedia, live.com); 2 common add-ons installed (ietab and adblock plus)

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For the final project in my Experience Design class, my team created a museum experience of what life might be like on Mars. My team started this project out by visiting the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. We read multiple papers, and looked at research that had been done about Mars and what life might be like on Mars. From there we created a prototype experience and ran some user testing. We iterated and tested our design several times until we came to this final design. Although our design targeted families with children, we had a design constraint to be universally accessible. In order to better understand accessibility issues, each member in my team prototyped a handicap of some kind. The video also shows these disability prototypes, the insights we gained, our prototyping experience, and our user testing. In this video we attempt to show what the experience of our exhibit might be like for visitors.

I’ll be posting this design, along with more detail about our process on my site soon. For now, I hope you enjoy our final video of Life on Mars.

Life on Mars from John Wayne Hill on Vimeo.