Metronaut for iOS

Mobile App - Music Education Tech.
Website - antescofo.com
( View app in iTunes )

About: Antescofo, a French startup in Paris, France, developed an Ai software to play music dynamically with humans. The original team of 4 esteemed PhD engineers and one music industry professional brought me and 2 other designers in to help.

Challenge: In 4 months, I needed to conduct user research and work closely with design and engineering teams to dream up and prototype a intuitive and engaging mobile app concepts for solo musicians during practice and/or performance.

Process: User interviews, experience mapping, user personas, user scenarios, user testing, mock ups, a prototype, and a final presentation of all research findings.

Research

Interviews: To begin we wanted to meet and study tarrget users. We aimed to better understand regular tendencies around music practice as well as musician attitudes and goals. Given a target audience of orchestral musicians, we tapped into local students of the Paris Conservatoire and conducted 3 user interviews.

Key discoveries:

My favorite user interview was at the home studio of a semi-professional cello player. On-site interviews come with all the nuanced details of a true environment. This would have been lost by meeting face-to-face in cafes. We noted the accessibility and relationships between relevant props like music stands, speakers, cases, and the user's available space to move in. One key observation was how the musician had to juggle his instrument with one hand while turning the pages of his music workbooks.

Stakeholder map:

Empathize

Experience mapping: After digesting our interviews I sat with the other designers to brainstorm many app feature concepts. We plotted dozens of digital post-it notes on a broad scoping exepience map during this divergent ideation session.

User personas:We developed 2 clear profiles which cover the vast majority of our application's use cases - professionals and amateurs.

User testing: The engineering team had fashioned an early basic prototype (think grayscale) with out-of-the-box iOS elements. This was awesome because we had a functioning prototype to conduct 4 different sessions of live user testing in the lab.

My favorite discovery from our user-testing sessions was how much users enjoyed the real-time feedback from the app during their test performances. People would squint hard to see a small number that reflected their current tempo match to the original recording of a track. People would smile when they neared 100%. Having finished Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow" just prior, I could see people slipping into an optimal experience when the challenges of a new or difficult song approapriately matched their skills.

User scenarios: Given our 2 main user types I wanted to illustrate 4 key scenarios with contrasting win/fail stories. I used these simple slides to help unify the the team's vision of what we were working on together - even in our very different roles:

Create

Design & Interpretation: After a series of pen/paper wireframes I took my first stab at Adobe XD (it was in Beta then) and began to create mock-up screens later adding in annotated descriptions.

Prototype: Quick and handy prototyping functions in XD.