Aoide: A Genre and Timeline Aware Browsing for MLibrary Music Collections
Background: This was a self-initiated project that won my team second place in a design competition. I assembled a team of fellow students who wanted to hone their design and research skills to improve access to the music collection within the university library. I participated in conducting research and also take the lead to design the timeline-based album browsing interface in the final design.
Aside from the submission and presentation deadlines set by the competition, I had to work with my teammates to make a plan and distribute the work among ourselves. We not only need to meet our internal deadlines but also accommodate scheduling issues with other course work and opportunity for presentation to showcase our work and get feedback. Finishing this project certainly gave me a better perspective on how to lead a self-initiated project from initiation to completion. I shared my experience with other masters students I mentored later, which led them to become the finalist of another design competition in 2016 (see Mentorship).
My role(s): Project Coordinator, Researcher, Designer
Collaborator(s): Sylvia Lai, Pei-Chih Shih, Yi-Ying Lin, Gin Chieng
Motivation: Browsing a library's catalog is not an easy task as the standard search-results-in-a-list design often fails to show the intricate relationships between works by different authors and how an author's works evolve. Music is one such category where the standard interface does not support navigation of albums in different dimensions (e.g., genre, artist, and time).
Problem Solving: Through engaging library patrons and drawing influences from other catalogs, we developed Aoide, a browsing system that allowed patrons to navigate the music collection through visualization that highlight relationships between artists and genres, and presented the ways how artists' styles evolve over time.
Contextual Inquiry
Personas & Scenarios
Comparative Analysis
Lo-Fi
Usability Test
Hi-Fi
Outcomes: The outcomes of this project include a website documenting the research process and findings, an interactive prototype, hi-fi illustrations, and an award from the Unversity of Michigan Library iDesign competition.
Summary:
Award: University of Michigan Library iDesign Competition Second Place
Date: 2012 Fall
Project web site: Aoide
The project was initiated as an entry to the iDesign competition held by the University of Michigan Library and the School of Information to reinvent access to the library.
I assembled a team of fellow graduate students who were interested in using this project to horn our design and research skills.
After multiple brainstorming sessions, we decided to focus on rethinking the access to multimedia items, more specifically the music collection, as
- multimedia items were less known by fellow students, based on our preliminary assessment through asking around our social circles, and
- our teammates shared interest in music.
As the goal was to reinvent access to the library's music collection, we want to obtain perspectives from both stakholers who are designing and maintinging the catalog, and also users of the catalog. We interviewed a music librarian, a technical librarian, and 5 university students.
Based on the interviews, we developed personas and scenarios and performed a comparative analysis of other catalog systems to guided our iterative-design process from lo-fi to high-fi prototype. For more details, see the project website.
- Age: 21
- Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Tech Level: Tech-savvy
- Wants to find more time to visit her family in California
- Wants to find time to practice her dance routines
- Juggles a full-time course load along with a part-time job
- Does not have enoough time to practice her dance routines with her teammates