VoiceComposer GR3 - Paper Prototyping

Prototype photos

Briefing

Our project is called VoiceComposer, and it's intended to let users quickly record a melody they're thinking of onto their smartphone.

Scenario tasks

1. Record a melody line.
2. Change one of the notes in your melody.
3. Add a harmony line.
4. Export the song.

Observations

first design:

obvious selection of notes
time marking on track
representation of multiple tracks
"cut track" is confusing
clicked on back to add harmony
feedback for saving / afraid to lose changes
piano mode
piano icon confusing
copy song / save as

revised design:

"it's an eye?"
"this is clearly volume"
opened song to export
"export is tiny"

tapped on the layer buttons for a while before Record
used Undo to "change a note"
tried to drag a rectangle on the screen to select notes
should we make tapping on whitespace create new notes?
should we make dragging select multiple notes? vertical/horizontal?
recorded over layer before figuring out how to add harmony

should make "exit" say "menu" or something?

Prototype iteration

• Since users found the top menu bar confusing, we removed one of the buttons and replaced the "Main Menu" button with "Save" and "Exit" buttons.
• We decided that editing individual notes would be done through a modal overlay, so that users could use more of the limited screen space to swipe and drag.
• Audio editors commonly support arbitrarily many tracks, which can be moved around, created, and deleted. Our prototype originally used a scrolling list of tracks, but we replaced that with a layers metaphor where there are exactly four tracks, and they're overlaid on top of each other on the screen.