DH199-2020S
UX Design Research:
Music in LA
by Rebecca Lin
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Los Angeles is a world-revered music city that has an incredible history in paving the way for pop, rock, hip hop, electronic music, and more. For my capstone project, I would like to explore how we can keep Los Angeles's music scene alive while never forgetting its history and staying true to its roots.
There exist several mobile applications, such as Livenation, Ticketmaster, or Hereby, that provide local music event results, but they present user experience design issues in organization, customization, and more. For my re-design, I would like to focus on creating a more tailored and enlivened experience for local music experience in Los Angeles, not only for the present location-based information, but also for the temporal context of L.A.'s thriving music scene and living cultural history.
EXPECTED OUTCOME
Following a user-centered design process by conducting user research, literature review, UX storytelling, wireframing/flow/low-fidelity prototyping, high-fidelity prototyping, and usability testing, I plan to create an interactive prototype that demonstrates my findings in the research process, as well as to document my process on this website alongside a research paper.
PROJECT TIMELINE
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
WEEK 8
WEEK 9
WEEK 10
Initiate web documentation
Final report and presentation
LITERATURE REVIEW
Modern day mobile devices have allowed for users to engage simultaneously with the physical and cultural fabrics of their surroundings in novel ways. Especially in bridging on-screen and off-screen experiences, locatability and mobility as affordances of mobile devices offer location-based technology as a way for users to transform their understanding of space in the present moment, and thus, what they are doing in space (Schrock, 2015). Digital tools to annotate space on a physical level, such as user review and recommendation functionality, empower users to be active participants in the meaning-making of such a space in a more dynamic and personal way (De Souza e Silva, 2013). Music experience, which is “essentially contextual” and serendipitous (Åman and Liikkanen, 2013), has particularly been amplified by this combination of location and recommendation technology; for example, users of Åman and Liikkanen’s (2013) location-based, festival music event recommender prototype felt more aware of events in their local area, which in return gave them an “intensified feeling of living in the flow of the city.” However, while there appears to be a growing body of work on the intersection of mobile music experience and location-based recommendations, many researchers note that the actual services have yet to succeed commercially despite scholarly interest.
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Efforts to improve the usability of such services have emphasized user personalization. Koskela et al. (2010) contend that a user’s personal music preferences can be used to provide recommendations based on the style of the entertainment premise, such as bars or clubs with unique music styles. They extend that, for those who enjoy mobile music experience, this can be an avenue to explore when used in large, unfamiliar cities, though with better music profiling technology (Koskela et al., 2010). Considering developments in music data repositories, such as the modern information potentially available with Spotify’s data expanse, it may be more promising. More recently, however, Åman, Liikkanen, and Hinkka, explore this aspect of user personalization through a more tangibly constructive lens. They build off of De Souza e Silva’s (2013) research to affirm that not only can music and location data provide a more immersive experience of music in space, but also adding into the interplay the element of user annotation in meaning-making through visual element and social elements, such as photos or social media functions, respectively, can improve usability. However, they also caution that adding increasing experiential layers (social, visual, auditory, etc.) to the user experience can begin to convolute the user journey, so it is important to have an easy-to-follow and filtered design (Åman, Liikkanen, and Hinkka, 2015).
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This study aims to add to existing research by further exploring how incorporating augmented reality sound elements into the location-based, music event recommender application Harby can transform user experience in connecting people with both the real-time and historical music culture of their local city.
MAIN DESIGN CHALLENGE
The main activity my project aims to support is spontaneous music event discovery—being able to discover and attend music events while roaming around Los Angeles. In reference to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the basic need this activity seeks to satisfy is social belonging. Not only are live music events often places of community gathering, but users may also encounter a feeling of being in tune with the city they are in by engaging with events unfolding in the present.
The current solutions to satisfy the needs of the user tend to depart from this feeling of “spontaneity.” Larger live music events may be discovered through ticketing websites like Ticketmaster, in which tickets, if still available, can be purchased right up to the event start time, which can make for a genuinely impromptu, but more commercial experience. On the other hand, smaller, more intimate music events in clubs or bars may be harder to come by and are often only heard through word-of-mouth; you have to know where to find them.
Technology could be used to enhance this feeling of spontaneity by allowing users to discover these small music events on-the-go using a location-based tracker and real-time search functionality. Even more, an augmented reality sound layer that weaves in sounds of local music while the user also hears sounds of the cards driving by, the bustle of people walking on the streets, and ambient noise from the environment could create an entirely new immersive user experience of feeling as one with the city and finding music on location.