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Learnability, heuristic evaluation: In our earlier computer prototype, users had a difficult time interpreting multiple notes delivered by the interface while ear training. We discovered that learnability is best achieved by playing a single note at a time, and allowing users to guess them in succession. This design can also be smoothly expanded in many simple ways, for example, to allow for chords, or timed play.
OVERALL APPEARANCE
Color, heuristic evaluation: Our color scheme from GR4 was criticized by several of our GR4 testers, so we completely revamped it. We went from a plain white, gray, black color scheme to a wood based color scheme that uses black and a few pastel colors to draw attention to immediately relevant features. One of our user testers expressed that pianos don’t actually change color when touched and our TA pointed out that some of the colors we used earlier are very saturated, so we changed our piano's response on click be a much more modest color changes.
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Learnability, paper prototyping: As mentioned earlier, the panel design gives the user the flexibility to skip reading the instructions and still know what to do in order to go back and read them. This increases the learnability and turned out to be a much better design that the dialog box.
Fig: First Panel
Fig: Second Panel
Fig: Third Panel
PIANO
Color scheme, heuristic evaluation: As mentioned earlier, the color scheme of the piano was redone to be much milder. Default colors are a pale golden gradient for the white keys, to subtly match the wood in the page background, and the black keys have a slight white gradient on the edges.
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Mode visibility, heuristic evaluation: Several of our user testers felt that exercises lacked a feeling of completion, so we came up with the idea of persisting a correct guess (once the correct note is clicked, it remains highlighted in pale green until the next exercise is begun), which helps indicate the completion of an exercise and improves learnability by encouraging the user to try something else, besides the piano (i.e. the "New Tone" button).
Fig: Piano
SETTINGS
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
IMPLEMENTATION
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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.
REFLECTION:
We learnt a bunch of things over the course of the semester, for example
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