Serendipitree - Team Waltz (aka Team 3)
Design Jam London
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Final presentation
Who are we designing for?
Music explorers & adventurers - people who are actively looking for new music.After the interim
- Task plan
- User tasks
- User journey
- Solidify concept
- Wireframes
What did you learn?
That it’s 4pm and we ran out of time to discuss this :)Did we answer the brief?
- Mitigate social awkwardness - check (anonymous tunes)
- Are people happy? (tree of happiness)
- Discover new music (it’s all about the seeds and planting)
- Facilitate interaction (possibility of social elements in the future)
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Introducing…
Find new music, spread the music you love, and watch it grow, all with Serendipitree :)
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Serendipitree
During the delving phase, we started to consider how to keep music fresh and discoverable in the system.
The initial concept we had is that we have music tracks that have been ‘dropped’ for users to ‘pickup’ based on their location, but we needed a way to gameify and make the system engaging.
At first we thought that a track would be picked up, and then dropped off once a user has either listened to the full thing, or decided they didn’t like it anymore.
We realised that this would make tracks have a rarity in the system, and stop the spread of music if a user stops using the system with a ‘picked up’ track in their library.
We worked on the idea of the tracks spreading, or dying out based on the number of times they’d been dropped off or trashed.
A new set of rules
* all numbers below are for example only - it’s pretty scalable
A planted (or seeded) track can be ‘picked up’ from one location by up to 50 users - then it disappears from that location.
User listens to one track at a time, and then can make a decision.
When a user plays a track, they can either plant the track at their current location, or trash the track (killing off that branch of the tracks seeding), or play it later.
A user can’t have more than 10 tracks in their playlist.
A track shows as anonymous, so that the user gets to judge it on the music rather than any appreciation.
We’ve been using terms such as seeding (putting the initial tracks in the system), planting (dropping off tracks users like), trees & branches (when working out the structure of how the tracks would get spread).
Earlier on in the day, one of the team (I think it was Jason) used the word Serendipity when referring to how our users would find their tracks - someone thought the play on the structure and theme by calling it Serendipitree.
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Delving into the idea
The next stage (over lunch) for us was to delve into our idea further, and work towards defined tasks that can help to identify the core, minimum viable product, that we could feasibly produce documentation and designs for the final presentation.
We started with the core requirements - the ability to pick-up and drop-off tracks, and grew possibilities and kept it as simple as possible.
Here’s a diagram of what we’ve worked out - with some notes below:
Entities in the game
Music Tracks (seeds)
Song / music filePlayers (carriers)
Preferences
Playing historyGame history
Locations
People
Song life -
Generic persona
As we don’t have time for user research, we put together a basic user persona that helped focus us on possible locations, technical limitations and key features:
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The initial concept
After working through a number of initial concepts, we focussed on commuters serendipitously finding new music, whilst travelling on the tube.
Adam mentioned the idea of some kind of ‘dropbox’ type system, along the lines of geocaching or old skool spy message drops. Where users of the system were able to discover new music based on tracks that had been ‘dropped’ (virtually) that they could ‘pick up’, based on their proximity to their current location.
We all really got behind the concept, and started to brainstorm possible features, usage, and limitations.
Shortly before we were due to present to the rest of the teams we sat down and wrote a few key elements of the system, and a list of our approach so far:
At this point we realised that some form of ‘gamification’ could help encourage users to get involved and engaged further.
The idea that tracks had some kind of value within the system, and the users behaviour impacted on their ability to pickup new tracks.
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Filtering
We found that we’d got a large range of locations and interactions, and it was time to start filtering out combinations based on the limitations and considerations of the initial brief.
By setting out a grid against headings such as Interaction with Strangers, Discovery, Feeling / Emotions, and Situational, we organically reduced the list to 4 locations: Shopping Malls, Tube/Trains, Parks, Town Square.
We then discussed the grid points against each of the locations and ran through some basic ideas around people’s interaction with music at each touch point.
Around this time, we found ideas for possible projects started to pop up, including a really interesting art-type installation based on music playing connected to people’s proximity to a fixed point - brilliantly explained by this simple diagram:
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Brainstorming
We started with some basic brainstorming around the idea of public spaces and situations.
This helped us to bring a list together of spaces separated by music being played already, or not played.
From there, we did some more brainstorming around how people interact with music in those locations normally.
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Hello from Team Waltz!
We’re team 3, also known as Team Waltz, here at Design Jam London 3.
(Team 3, 4 members, 3/4 = Waltz)
Introducing (from left to right):
Adam (@admataz)
Steve (@subcide)
Jason (@jasonchanoz)
Les (@lescochrane)
