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- The backend was implemented in Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database.
- Concert information for the next few months was gathered by hand and stored in the database.
- Concert and artist information were gathered through Echonest’s API
- Katrina’s listening information was gathered through last.fm’s API
- The artist similarity visualization was seeded on Katrina's listening habits.
Impact on Usability
The largest impact on usability came from not fully integrating various services. For example, a user flipped through the website, looking for a link to buy tickets for the concerts she had selected. This is a reasonable expectation for a concert recommendation site, but integration with ticket vendors was deemed too overwhelming to implement.
Evaluation
- Person 1
- age/gender: 19M
- music experience: dj-ing for 5 years at various local events in northern california, played the alto sax and piano for 10 years
- a musician currently at college: exactly our target population
- Person 2
- age/gender: 22F
- music experience: highly accomplished concert pianist for 17 years, has performed with the boston symphony orchestra
- a musician alum from MIT. A little more tech-savvy than our expected user population.
- Person 3
- age/gender: 20F
- music experience: pianist for 8 years, music major at MIT. Discerning music taste.
- A music major at MIT who is very picky about concerts. She’s not very experienced with finding concerts online, and only hears about them through word of mouth. Almost exactly our target population.
Our interface received a decent amount of positive feedback. Things people liked included:
- The friends visualization graph was clear and entertaining. Lots of “ooh, cool” and “I like this!” comments.
- The interface was minimal and easy to navigate
- The aesthetics of the site were well-liked. The visualizations were visually pleasing.
However, users also struggled with some aspects. Some of these issues (Ticketmaster integration and dynamic visualizations, for example) were difficulties stemming from implementation difficulties.
Issue | Severity | Solution |
|---|---|---|
Once they’d curated artists, users couldn’t find them efficiently on other graphs. | Major | Highlight curated concerts on the graph, and possibly provide for progressive filtering. |
Visualizations did not resize gracefully at lower resolutions (less than 800px wide) | Major | The target population will use this on a computer (>800px in width), but supporting smaller devices would be good. Have smaller, less extensive versions of the visualizations meant for smaller screens, or don’t print artist names. |
User wanted a consolidated page to see summaries of all the selected concerts. | Major | Add a home page that displays a summary of all the selected concerts, with text that makes it easy to email. |
Actions on concert nodes on the calendar page are inconsistent with the other visualizations. | Major | Switch actions between the ‘+’ button and the actual concert node. |
The visualizations were not affected by interests. | Minor | Progressive filtering could be implemented. It would be difficult to dynamically update the visualizations, however. |
Users expected more artist and venue information on the concert page. They had to click through to see information about the artist or venue. | Minor | Add artist and venue details on the concert page. |
User wanted to buy tickets and was uncertain how to do so. | Minor | Add TicketMaster integration. |
Text on the similarity graph overlapped | Cosmetic | Nodes on the graph need to be spaced out more. Text should be rotated more intelligently. |
Nodes on the friends graph floated over each other | Cosmetic | Prevent nodes in a force diagram from overlapping. |
Reflection
We really enjoyed the iterative design process. Since we were trying to come up with a novel means of concert discovery and recommendation, forcing us to put different designs on paper was illuminating. We received excellent feedback at each stage of the process, both from our users and from our TA. Forcing us to iterate through several paper prototypes (we went through the 3 paper prototypes, and tested 3 versions of one version) really helped highlight some severe usability problems, which were easily fixed and refined in subsequent versions.
Creating an unusual interaction with concerts was both exciting and challenging to us. Since we were steeped in the world of data visualization, graphs that made sense to us needed some clarification to others. For example, we realized that the idea of an interactive graph was still a little unusual to most of our users, especially ones from our target population. Thus, at each stage, we had to ensure that our graph had excellent visible affordances. User feedback was vital to us, since we had almost no similar interfaces to guide us. Thus, we attempted to address all of our user’s concerns in each stage of the process.