The Presentation - Week 5

During the week 5 contact lesson, we presented our concept designs to the class. Hiep ended up presenting the speech as Angus and I stood to the side and answered questions afterwards.

We received praise from the tutor dudes for our colour scheme, as it is quite appealing and kind of yummy looking. They also gave us advice on a few things we could change to create a better application. The main points were to do with the music player and putting in place a search bar that picks up keywords in order to recommend songs. 

We had already thought about putting a music player on the recommended pages and have it placed over the composers' portraits. On mouseover the music player will become clear at 100% opacity, but otherwise it will be faint, perhaps 20% opacity (in order to ensure users can still see the composers' faces beneath). 

As for the search bar, the tutor suggested removing the prompts all together and replacing it with a search bar. However, I think that it has been agreed upon within the group that we will keep about 6-8 of the prompts, push them down the page a little and make room for the search bar above. We will program in certain key words using JavaScript that will direct to an appropriate recommendations page. I think with the addition of this feature the application will become more interactive and engaging! I just hope we can implement it well. 

Screen Mockups!

These following screen mockups were created using Photoshop. 

The colour palette  

These colours were chosen because they're generally very attractive and create a calm environment. They're all generally warm, autumny tones that harmonise well together.

The Initial Page

The first thing the user wees as they are directed to the site. It has links to the About Page and a direct link to Trove. Once enter is clicked, the button will animate and they will be taken to the Home Page.

Home Page

Here they will be asked if they are feeling any of a series of questions. Such as, "Forgot your keys?", "Is it storming?", "Meant to be studying?" etc. These questions are aimed at a teenage to young adult audience so works such as fleek are used. After an option has been clicked, they will be redirected to the Suggestion Page.

Suggestion Page

Two songs will be collected from Trove based on the selection made by the user. It will display them and a description of the song as well as the composer. They will be able to listen to the song via this page. 

About Page

This page will just display information on the website. This information will include where the music is sourced, why the site has been created and aimed at teenagers to young adults. A brief description of how the site works will also be given.

Pre Design

Today I created some basic sketches of how the website could look/flow. I'll work on creating a digital copy on PhotoShop tomorrow. 

I was inspired to create a minimal design from the previous research I've conducted on other music recommending websites.

'Team Work in Action'

Based on the  http://teamworkinaction.ceit.uq.edu.au/ quizzy thing:

Pros and Cons of Working in A Team

Pros:

• Distributing work
• Meeting new people
• Possibly forming some fantastic friendships
• Sharing creative ideas, forming even better ideas!
• If you're not particularly good at something, someone else in the group might be great at it and can teach you, and vice versa 
• Learning how to deal with and overcome obstacles

Cons:

• Having lazy team members - having to pick up other people's slack
• If there is bad communication, situations get tense and work doesn't happen
• Clash of ideas

For me, when I work in a team, I am generally the person who pushes the group along and makes sure people are keeping to the schedule. I like to keep up with work loads and not fall behind, because it literally sucks having to catch up. I love sharing ideas with other people and receiving feedback from group members to help me improve my own ideas, and vice versa. Sharing and communication is key and you can't get far without it. 

Reflecting On Week 3

Reflecting on this past week, I would have to say I feel like things are moving pretty slowly. I'm someone who wants to get things done STRAIGHT AWAY. So having to slow down to other people's paces puts me out a little, but that's what team work is about, working together and not racing ahead of the pack. 

Aside from that, I think the solid concept has been established and I can't wait to start working out all the details of the design and seeing it begin to take shape. In my previous blog post, you can see I've already started researching other music recommendation sites so I have a basic idea in my head of how I'd like ours to be presented. 

Personally I wish we were further ahead in the assignment and that the Concept Document had already been started. Other than this, no issues were really encountered this week as we're still in the early stages and nothing has been discussed other than the concept itself. Hopefully this next week will be very productive and a visually appealing and easy to use layout will be established. I also hope there will be more communication within the group and that things can really start taking shape nicely. 

Trove Research

Information from these articles will be useful for the website:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (link)

Ludwig Van Beethoven (link)

Franz Liszt (link)

Johann Sebastian Bach (link)

Franz Schubert (link)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ???

Frederic Chopin (link) (link)

Claude Debussy (link)

Antonio Vivaldi (link) (link) (link)
Leroy Anderson  ???
John Cage ???


The beginning of a collection of songs:

Possible sad songs:

Requiem Mass in D Minor (Mozart) 

Piano Concerto No. 23 in A – II. Adagio (Mozart)

Moonlight Sonata (Mozart) 

Nocturne in C# Minor (Chopin)

Possible angry songs:

Night On Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky)
The Four Seasons, Summer (Vivaldi)

Possible moody songs:
Sarabande (Handel)

Possible calm songs:
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Debussy)
Gymnopédies (Eric Satie)
Clair de Lune (Debussy)
Prélude No.15 in D flat (Raindrop) Chopin

Possible happy songs:
Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin)

These songs will help heighten emotions. Not calm you down or cheer you up. Because why calm down when you're angry when you can just get angrier??? 

Research/Inspiration

After forming groups this week for the first project, I am feeling pretty excited. I'm keen to start forming a solid concept and creating some rough graphics to start visualising the end result.

Before I even open Photoshop and begin creating a basic template, I have done some research of other instances of music recommendation systems. 

TASTEKID (link)

Tastekid.com asks users to input a keyword and lets the user select what kind of search they'd like to perform. This service also provides users with the option of signing up to Tastekid so their searches can provide 'better, personalised recommendations'.

e.g I can search "Taylor Swift" in the music category, and similar artists are recommended to me.

The site then goes one step further. If you click on the artist, a drop down appears with information about artists, one of their music videos (possibly their most recent?), and statistics based on previous users. Users can go one step further and share the artist to their Facebook and/or Twitter timelines. 

The overall layout of the website is rather minimalist without flashing advertisements or excessive images, so I like that aspect. However, I do not enjoy the actual setting out of the recommendations. They appear scattered and not particularly ordered. I feel as though setting them out in a structured table would be much more visually appealing.

PANDORA (link)

Pandora is possibly the most known out of all the music recommendation sites. Just like the previous, users type in an artist's name to begin their search. However the next page differs from the previous site. A music player is situated at the top of the page where music automatically begins playing from. First a song from the artist will begin to play and afterwards a recommended song begins. Information about both artists is given with a list of other recommended artists below the blurb.

e.g I searched Years and Years. 

I'm given the option to publish/share the tune to my Facebook timeline or buy songs from the artist on Amazon. 

The overall appearance of the website works as it takes the basic music player format. Information is easy to read and the layout is very user friendly and doesn't detract from the purpose of searching for music. The fact that music automatically begins playing for the user to sample is a great feature that I really enjoy. And I love that songs just continue to play from different artists that all relate back to the original search. 

GNOOSIC (link)

Gnoosic is a super minimalist music recommender. Users simply type in three of their fav artists and the website generates a recommendation based on the user's favs. I personally love minimalism, so even though this website gives no information about the artists I personally really enjoy it. It provides simple recommendations to the users. The user is asked wether they liked, didn't liked or didn't know if they liked the recommendation, and based on that answer another artist is recommended. It's like a never ending loop of recommendations based on a one time input from the user and I think that is truly fantastic.

e.g

MOODFUSE (link)

This web based application asks the user for their mood, what genre of music their looking for and presents them with a playlist of songs catering to their current mood. This concept is the closest to that chosen for this project. The goal of this website was to simply match the user's mood with a certain genre of music, so a description of the artists isn't really necessary. 

e.g

MUSICOVERY (link)

Users simply have to hover over a dot within the square and music begins to play. The can select what genre they want to hear, or have all the genres selected. It's a very versatile system. Just like the previous example, the goal of this website was to simply match the user's mood with a certain genre of music. 
e.g

Based on my research, I think I'd like to follow a minimalist approach with a basic layout. The concept produced by team Loki differs from the websites displayed about, but I think the content could be formatted in a similar way to achieve an aesthetically pleasing user interface. Tastekid shows me what I want to avoid - I don't want to use drop down information tabs because users might not even know they exist. As I previously said, I don't enjoy the display of recommended artists and I'd much rather have a structured table format or simply the recommendations in a list beneath one another. Gnoosic is perhaps a bit too minimalist for what is necessary in this assignment, but Pandora is well balanced and will perhaps be my main source of inspiration. 

But I truly, truly, TRULY love Gnoosic. I've been using it for over half an hour now. Good stuff. Minimalism. Okay. Bye. 

Moody Music

During today's contact lesson (11/08/15), groups were assembled and concepts were chosen. The chosen concept for team Loki is called Moody Music.
This concept aims at simultaneously matching the user's mood to music while educating them about orchestral music and how these compositions can have calming, energising, etc. effects. 

// Description taken from Team Charter//

As users enter the site, they are presented with a series of questions based around current events that relate to emotions (e.g forgot your keys?(angry), is it raining?(calm/sleepy), just found $5 in the couch?(happy/excited)). After answering the question, they are directed to a page with the recommended song that they can choose to listen to upon clicking the play button. Each song will be specifically chosen to compliment the user’s selected emotion.

As Moody Music aims to be educational, the songs chosen from Trove will be older classical/orchestral pieces. To further utilise data from Trove, information about the composers of the songs and the compositions themselves will also be given to users on the recommended song pages.

The target audience of this concept ranges from teenagers to young adults, as it is apparent that many youth these days have not been exposed to the wonderful impact of orchestral music and have limited to no knowledge of older composers.

Addition

Instead of simply asking for a user's current mood, it's more interesting/entertaining to prompt them with actual questions.
A few I have thought of include:

Just had a break up? (angry/sad) (no songs yet)

In love? (happy) (no songs yet)

Forgot your keys? (angry) (no songs yet)

Is it raining? (calm) Clair de Lune

Can’t sleep? (calm) (no songs yet)

Just aced that exam? (excited/happy) 1812 Overture 

Just found $5 in the couch? (excited/happy) (no songs yet)

Got a headache? (this song is literally nothing) 4’33 John Cage

Meant to be studying? (undefined emotion but the song has a typewriter in it, so that's cool) The Typewriter - Leroy Anderson

Going for a run? (excited/energetic - something with a good tempo) (no songs yet)

Each question should recommend 2 songs to the user. As previously stated, the song recommendations will be followed by interesting facts about the composer and the songs themselves. 

Possible Concept Ideas

To prepare for the second contact session in week three, I prepared a few concept ideas, to present during group discussions, that would make use of data collected from Trove.

1) Famous Aviators
The concept revolves around the idea of presenting a blurb about a famous historical aviation event and presenting the user with a list of famous aviators. The user has the line up the famous aviation event with the associated aviator. 
This would be classified as an educational game as users would either be revising on historical events of learning about them.

2) Real or Fake
Real of Fake would present users with a blurb about a very strange object/appliance. The user would have to decide whether or not they believe the item is real or fake. If the object/appliance is real, further information about it will be given to the user after they guess whether it is real or not. 

3) Guess Who
Guess who would be a broader version of Famous Aviators. There could be a few options prior to beginning the game. Users could choose Historical Events, Singers or Actors/Actresses. After selecting the category, users would be prompted with trivial questions and given four people to choose from. 

Course Expectations

Based on what I know of this course, I expect to be working with a team and developing my own skills in design and implementation of computer projects. 

I want to experience designing a computer based project with a group of people who have different thought processes to my own, so I can be exposed to new ideas that help to further my own learning. I believe that exposure to other people's thoughts on designing and observing how they undertake certain tasks is vital to shaping a better design and overall thought process.

Because of previous experience in DECO classes, I am worried about being placed in a group with people who do not take the course seriously or pull their own weight. I am hopeful that this will not be the case. However, if it is, I will try to find peaceful ways of resolving conflict. 

I truly hope we can work peacefully in a group and overcome any disagreements or arguments, that have potential to arise, in a calm and mature manner. I also hope that I can prove to be a dedicated team member who other members can rely on to work efficiently during group and individual activities.