User Study for Paper Prototype #2

We went to Rabin Square in Tel-Aviv to test our second prototype and see how people react to it. Apart from it being an incredibly hot, hazy, dusty, windy day, we got some important insights about our design, the most notable one being that our affordance isn't good enough at the moment. People looking at the map didn't understand it's about music, and 2 users actually thought it's a station for information about the city.
We started out with a musical note icon, and on the second prototype moved to an earphone icon. A combination of the two might be needed to further clarify the use of the map.

Videos of 3 of our users:

User 1 from Itamar Gilon on Vimeo.

One conducted in English:

User 2 (in English) from Itamar Gilon on Vimeo.

User 3 from Itamar Gilon on Vimeo.

Paper Prototype User Study

Today Itamar, Sharon and Omri went out with a paper prototype to check-out some potential user responses.
Our prototype of Streetbeat is a cereal box:

This device emulates the experience of viewing a city-map with embedded microphone jacks. While letting users play with it, we purposefully did not mention the Android app.

We interviewed a total of 8 students/research-personnel at the IDC campus. Below is a summary of recurring comments and otherwise significant feedback regarding the user experience:

• The look & feel of the actual device is important as that will most likely have an effect on the degree to which people will approach it.
• About half of the participants understood roughly what to do.
• Some commented that they would feel "silly" standing next to this for a long while.
• A song list/local chart/"new entries" is a good addition, it should be part of the device (and not exclusively on an app)
• Being able to "take" the music from the device is a generally desired feature
• A "Share" or more communal feature should be added (like knowing who is the person that listens to the song being played, not just knowing where it's from)
• About half testified the experience was all-in-all fun

Negative parts of the experience:

• Finding only music you don't appreciate
• Just the musical experience has no added value from listening to music on a phone/player
• Two participants said the geographic part isn't really connected with the musical experience
• Not everybody carries around ear/head-phones all the time
• Jacks are outdated. There's newer, nicer technologies
• One participant commented that she prefers not to be "active" (she would like for the music to be played via speakers or something of the sort)

Some videotaped responses:

User Studies

During the first weeks of January, 2013, we employed several methods of data gathering to try and understand what our potential users might feel when they use the StreetBeat. These are the main results:
First, following a FaceBook survey we conducted (52 participants of which 25 were female; conducted during the first week of January, 2013), we learned that close to half of participants rated their concern about the invasion of privacy by the StreetBeat as 1 (minimum) and the as the rating goes up, the frequency goes down:

But we also found that only 22 of our participants reported actually listening to music while walking outside (no correlation between gender and this tendency: ).

To better capture the StreetBeat experience, we conducted an experiment at the IDC Psychology labs campus, between January 9th and 14th. Participants were 9 first and third year psychology students (6 female). First year students received academic credit for participation.
The experiment was conducted with small (2-4 people) groups. Each participant arrived at the labs campus and with his or her respective group, selected a favorite song and was asked to listen to this song on a device provided by the experimenter. All participants were told that these devices were loaded with a software that "senses" the song being played and sends it to a server to display this data.
Following a 1-minute listening session, participants were asked to follow an experimenter to another room, where all the songs listened-to by the group were displayed on a wall-mounted 19" screen.
Following this, participants filled in a questionnaire.
Here we found that 7 of the 9 participants rated issues of privacy (how they felt about seeing their own music on the wall and how they felt about other's seeing their music on the wall) as 1 (minimum). The highest rated measure was "how interested were you in the music played by others?". 5 participants rated this as 4 or 5.

With each of the groups we also conducted a focus group where we explained the idea thoroughly. Here 9 out of 9 participants said the idea of adding headphone jacks was "excellent". 7 out of 9 said they think it's a good idea and 2 said they thought it is not relevant for joggers.

3 participants agreed to be provide video feedback (interviews conducted in Hebrew):
Participant No. 1

Participant No. 2:

Participant No. 3

2 participants (3rd year students) reported that they did not believe us at any point of the experiment.
2 participants stressed out that they enjoyed our experiment :-)

This is a good base to design a more detailed experiment at the IDC campus, which is currently in the works.