DESIGN:
Paper prototypes, focusing on the right problem: We discarded the concept of having a multimodal interface, i.e. our final design focuses entirely on ear training and does not have the “record and share” functionality.
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External consistency, heuristic evaluation: The settings dialog was cleaned up and a "Save" button was added, since some users were confused about when settings went into effect.
Fig: Settings
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IMPLEMENTATION
Playing the piano was revamped completely in between GR4 and GR5. Previously, there were a number of problems with playing on the piano
i. scratchy wav files with a hiccup at the beginning of each file
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iii. it only supported Chrome (Firefox used to give a mpeg/mp3 can’t be loaded error)
All of the above affected how smooth our interface felt when played on browsers, as scratchy audio and notes cutting each other off did not feel like a real piano. We fixed all the above problems by using .ogg files instead of .mp3 files. We also used better quality files we found after in a MIDI library on github.
The biggest design decision to simplify the exercise structure made our implementation even simpler, as we no longer needed to generate a database of exercises. Instead, the application now randomly chooses one out of a subset of notes to test the user with.
We do not actually have a backend (i.e. all our code is javascript, css and html). Also, out javascript code is very modular. We have pseudo-classes for piano, exercise_controller, cookie_management and so on similar to the structure for the “Rules” and “Board” we saw in the Checkerboard homeworks.
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EVALUATION:
Many of our users were people who we interviewed back during the need-finding stage. they previously expressed interest in testing the final product, so they were easy to call back for a round of testing.
BRIEFING
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We will add scores according to the accuracy of the user on the test, and give them labels such as “bronze”, “silver”, and “gold” according to their performance in each difficulty level.
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REFLECTION:
We learnt a bunch of things over the course of the semester, for example
i. the importance of prototyping, and that users will always bring forward issues that never occurred to us before talking to them
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