The Problem
Our team formed with an initial interest in designing for musicians. Thus, we began our process with needfinding interviews with five sound designers and musicians
to identify pain points in their creative lives. Two interviews stood out to us.
WE MET: John, music lecturer and composer
WE LEARNED: how he took photos and wrote descriptions of nautral settings while on nature field recording journeys to gather materials for his compositions
WE WONDERED: how might we help creators quickly capture multimedia content and organize it in one place?
WE MET: Robert, EDM producer
WE LEARNED: about his difficulties with being spontaneously creative and find insipiration in the moment
WE WONDERED: how might we help creative instantenously generate ideas?
Recognizing how both John and Robert struggled with capturing, organization and re-accessing their moments of inspiration, we came up with an initial idea: a mobile app where users could collect
inspiration in their daily lives using photos, videos, audio recordings, drawings, and text, which would be auto-generated
into moodboards, sparking excitement and creativity.
The Process
To begin our prototyping process, we identified three core tasks we wanted a user to be able to accomplish in the app: br>
- TASK 1: Quickly capture and save audio, pictures, video, writing and drawings using the app
- TASK 2: Customize synthesized moodboard automatically generated from captured multimedia
- TASK 3: Share and collaborate on moodboards with other users
CONCEPT VIDEO
We created a concept video to visually communicate our idea. Out of 12 project groups, our professors and peers voted our concept video Best Overall.
LOFI PROTOTYPE
For this iteration, we used Balsamiq, an online "paper-like" prototyping tool, to map out flows for our three core tasks.
TASK 1: Quickly capture and save audio, pictures, video, writing and drawings using the app
TASK 2: Customize synthesized moodboard automatically generated from captured multimedia
TASK 3: Share and collaborate on moodboards with other users
We tested the prototype with three users, asking them to complete each task twice. We evaluated efficiency, tracking the number of clicks or taps it took the user to complete the task,
and learnability, comparing the speed of completing the task the first time versus the second time. We found that task 2 took significantly more clicks and more time to complete
than anticipated, primarily because our moodboard display screen caused confusion.
MEDFI PROTOTYPE
For our next design iteration, we transitioned to Figma. Based on our previous user testing, we created a simpler moodboard display screen. We also added a media library to
facilitate manual moodboard creation and editing.
TASK 1: Quickly capture and save audio, pictures, video, writing and drawings using the app
TASK 2: Customize synthesized moodboard automatically generated from captured multimedia
TASK 3: Share and collaborate on moodboards with other users
We shared our prototype with peers, who conducted a heuristic evaluation, identifying violations of 13 essential design principles. They suggested we focus our efforts on
improving flexibility and efficiency by making it easier to customize moodboard generation and cleaning our design by removing unnesscary elements and creating clearer button icons.
The Result
We created a high-fidelity prototype using ReactNative, producing an Android and iOS compatible app with fully coded time and location based moodboard generation
algorithms.
TASK 1: Quickly capture and save audio, pictures, video, writing and drawings using the app
TASK 2: Customize synthesized moodboard automatically generated from captured multimedia
TASK 3: Share and collaborate on moodboards with other users
We presented our work to industry leaders in design and human-computer interaction at a course project expo, allowing attendees to use our app to capture
their own inspiration and generate personalized moodboards.