Robot Rock

User 1: 18 year old female, no musical experience (does not understand what 'tempo' is) User 2: 20 year old female, significant musical experience (pianist, clarinetist, saxophonist) Users were present at the same time

Initial Playthrough:

• Took a moment to realize what to do
• Asked 'What do I do?' 'How do I add instruments?' - Ended up solving the problems on her own
• Played around adding musicians
• Moved musicians around
• Asked about energy (what is it?) and various controls on the right panel
• Naturally arranged musicians to make a cool beat
• Really enjoyed the percussion, especially the hand drum
• Was annoyed with acoustic guitar
• Had a lot of fun just playing with musician locations and the sounds coming as a result

Feedback:

What was the most frustrating?

• Acoustic guitar was annoying, sounded bad
• Did not understand what the right side controls were (what is the difference between energy, beats per bar, and tempo?)
• Wanted a grid, but realized she would have stuck to the grid it she was given one
• Want a way to delete all, instead of one at a time
• Wanted a better variation in acoustic guitar's chords

What was most enjoyable?

• Hand drum!
• Really intuitive (basically picked it up instantly)
• Cute images for the instruments
• Start and Stop was really intuitive
• Adding a musician was really easy

Other notes

• Complexity was intuitive, energy was not
• Have a way to save music
• Have woodblock respond to key
• Change the keys of individual instruments
• Thought band order (and spotlight) were REALLY cool when they were mentioned
• Also really liked the idea of a production mode, and the idea of being an instrument (knowing these intentions helped with how they felt about the program)
• Needs some color, flash, flair!
• Bolder and bigger words
• Record and playback options would be nice

What I Learned

• The users really enjoyed just being able to play around in the canvas. The whole experience in it seemed very natural.
• If the user does not understand something then they might plat with it really quick, but will most likely ignore the feature altogether.
• Needs a tutorial or something to indicate how to start (my version did not have one, so I just did a quick explanation, like 1/2 a sentence).
• Terminology was too musical. Things like tempo, key, bar, and energy were misunderstood. However, complexity was immediately understood.