Robot Rock

Here's the current edition of our reflections on our own prototype. If you have anything to add, now would be the time.

Overall, the paper prototype for the Robot Rock project gained us clean insights into our overall design that we, as designers, had trouble seeing. Several elements of design which we thought were fairly simple and intuitive turned out to be far more complicated and confusing to users.

Major features marked as confusing or unnecessary were: * Instrument lock button - This was planned as a way for the user to lock in a particular pattern being played by a robot, as opposed to letting the robot change its pattern over time.

• Energy vs. Complexity axes - The difference between these two parameters was not at all apparent to users, and needed to be clearly explained in example.

• Resizing of instruments to alter volume - Without only a small marking on the corner to indicate that an instrument is resizable, users were not likely to try and resize.

Especially for the axes, we did not expect users to have the above problems. We had tried to keep the interface as simple and intuitive as possible, so with a clean window we expected users to explore and discover most functionality. Elements that did work as expected were:

• Adding new instruments to stage
• Drag and drop to move instruments on 2D stage (once axes sorted out)
• Individual instrument mute button

As for changes, we have decided to entirely drop the lock button functionality, to keep up the idea that this program is a live instrument. The axes we will keep as is, but they will certainly have a place in the documentation explaining the difference, with possibly some audible examples. Resizing of instruments will be dropped in favor of a plain volume slider or similar. Finally, some of the more advanced features such as ensemble order, song key, and time signature will be moved into collapsable frames, so that novice users can enjoy a clean stage without adding unnecessary controls.

Preparation went well overall; there were no major elements of the UI that were not present in the prototype. What was missing, and what will be included in the final product, is some form of documentation explaining various interface components. As it was, we did have to step in a number of times in order to explain exactly what a particular action meant.