Play: work in progress
How to improve the experience of finding and playing music?
Digital media collections, both personal and online, are growing at a tremendous rate. To make these collections available is a challenge, especially for music. An ethnographic study from Cunningham et al. shows that users have difficulty to describe or categorize music. [1]
To make large collections of music accessible to users, popular services such as iTunes and Last.fm offer recommendations. This approach relieves users from recalling songs and allows them to discover new or forgotten items. But recommendations present problems such as trust and lack of user control.
My thesis project explores how to use tags to explain and refine playlist recommendations.
MetroTracks
A sketch with the last.fm api, that shows the top tracks played on last.fm by metro area. I'm having trouble to display certain characters, like kana, because there is no 3D Helvetica for it. While I wait for someone to come up with 3D type that can display those characters, here is sketch with a 2D version.
Linkolage
This is a personal project that developed into Delicious DNA. I started "linkolage" because I'm interested in the way that people find, store and share links, and I wanted to create a visualization with that data. I also wanted to learn more about interactive design processes and research while working on the project.
I started the project by interviewing some friends about how they found, stored and shared links. Using my friends as sample users is not the right thing to do but this is a hobby project so I had to work with what I had. It was still very helpful and I did learn a lot from that. These are some affinity diagrams I made from the interviews and design ideas. I also wrote four personas from the small sample of interviews.
Then I spent some time thinking about the relationship between browser history, search history and bookmarks. I realized they are closely interconnected and ideally they should all be integrated in one tool. The problem is, browser history is sensitive information and the only of collecting that data in a trustworthy way would be, for example, as a Firefox extension. That sounded far too complicated so I gave up on that idea.
The other options I had were to use the feed from Google Search History or the feeds from del.icio.us. The problem was that the feeds just provide the last bookmarks or searches made. There was also the del.icio.us api, but then again, I was concerned about asking users their usernames and passwords. Then I found Scuttle, and awesome open source alternative to del.icio.us. I downloaded it and installed it on my server, so I could test and break things freely.
After that I concentrated on the specific data of social bookmarks – links, tags, descriptions, and exchange between users.
While looking at the bookmarks of some users at del.icio.us, I noticed how personal bookmarks can be, working almost as a personal diary. One of the ideas that came up was how to create a map of a users bookmarks, so they can have a more personal attachment to it (“this is how my bookmarks “look like””), or so that they can compare their bookmarks to other users. This is a visioning of one of the ideas:
Out of the ideas I had, I picked two to storyboard. These are some samples of the storyboards:
I'm currently working on different alternatives for the visual design:
