In January, 2004, we were tasked by our client with informing the design on a hard-drive-based car stereo system for storage and playback of up to 6000 digital music files. Specifically we were to identify how people interact with large music collections, design interface concepts and paradigms that support these usage intents and user needs, and to document the HCI processes and methodologies that were used. The proposed distribution of the work was split by class semesters. The first semester was to be dedicated to organizing, conducting, and analyzing results of contextual and interview data with the goal of understanding of how people interact with their music. We were to design and develop low fidelity prototypes of interface concepts and paradigms supporting the intents uncovered during the contextual research. The second semester was to be dedicated to finalizing the top candidate concepts and iteratively testing the concepts in a “clinic” environment with representative users and refining the designs based on our findings.
Because this work was in support of a radio entering sourcing and early production stages in late 2004, a number of additional constraints were given to us: 1) the technology used must be realizable for immediate production, 2) Speech recognition should be considered with extreme caution, 3) the radio-head paradigm (i.e. radio face in the console) must be maintained. We were also given two Marketing-oriented personas to help ground the user-segment at which we should target our designs. In March, 2004 we were given additional constraints: 4) Use a screen size and font definition similar to that being prototyped by the client, 5) Focus mainly on concepts for music playback, playlist management, and transferring of non-digital content to the hard-drive (i.e. ripping).
From the charter given to us, we began working to the following mission statement:
Design a jukebox car stereo that is usable, desirable, and safe in the car context, taking into account the constraints from our client (technical, design, schedule).
The strategy we employed to realize this mission was three-tiered:
1. Identify user intents
2. Address intents through design and functionality
3. Iteratively refine designs to optimize usability, desirability, and safety
