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| triplecode/ |
Home | Philosophy | Awards |
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MoodLogic |
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From startup to launch we worked with MoodLogic to help define what could be done with their core technology. No easy task, since they were developing the world's largest source of multidimensional, perception-based music metadata - including nearly 700 million data points collected on 550,000 songs. What began as design research, evolved into a set of full-featured search tools. Our Magnet Browser's advanced architecture, combined with an innovative and powerful interface, gives users the ability to explore and discover new music. Below is a version of an article that appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Innovation, Quarterly of the Industrial Designers Society of America. The issue was their Yearbook of Industrial Design Excellence. MoodLogic Magnet Browser People easily loose the ability to widen their musical horizon. Whether it is the music enthusiast, stuck in a particular style of music, or the amateur, who still listens to his high-school favorites. The MoodLogic browser was designed to not only help these people find music with which they are familiar and comfortable, but to provide the means by which they The browser allows people to search for songs based by musical characteristics and moods, rather than less intuitive and non-musical categories. MoodLogic was just starting up when it approached Triplecode to create a tool people could use to find music that matched their taste and mood. The company had a core music taxonomy technology but had not developed the means by which a music consumer could access its information. The primary task was to organize songs based on their relationships and display them in a way that would make sense to the user. Songs were selected from a "metadata database" – a data space that had over 24 dimensions with attributes like the name of the song, how people perceive the song, and abstract signal processing information. By the time the project was launched, tens of thousands of music listeners had contributed more than 300 million discrete opinions, from which MoodLogic was able to build music profiles for nearly 500,000 songs. It was important that the user's experience be intuitive. But there also needed to be some transparency to the complex underlying mechanism so users could trust the results provided. The design somehow had to make it clear what people should expect. MoodLogic also asked for the system to feel like a "magical compass," that finds songs for you. This was a complicated and seemingly conflicting set of goals. Dancing Jiggles The sketches – with names like "magic circles," "dancing jiggles," "6d space plot," and "skyscrapers from above" – served to help us get a grip on the complexity of the task. They also helped MoodLogic's scientists, who were more familiar with traditional scientific visualization tools, to think in new ways about their data. The discussions triggered by the sketches led to greater success in our collaboration. Many of these early designs were "sketched in code," and we interfaced some of them to the client's back-end servers to judge their usability with real data. We believe this approach to be unique because interface design, its implementation, and the back-end technology are normally developed at different times and with far less integration.
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Narrower and Narrower (A Design Emerges) In the browser's first full implementation, magnets and filters were interchangeable - any search criterion could be used as either a filter or a magnet. Users couldplace "happy" and "saxophone" as magnets, for example, and the songs would arrange themselves accordingly – often in unexpected but interesting ways. While this approach allowed the greatest flexibility in searching, user testing found it to be too complicated. It took too long for people learn how to use the system. While a steep learning curve might be acceptable in another context, it was considered a problem for this web application – just as users were not assumed to be music experts, so too they should not need to become experts in this system. As a result, we narrowed the way in which filters and magnets are used. Filters would be used for categorical qualities of the music, and magnets only for the more abstract emotional characteristics. This makes it easy for users to quickly start using the browser and enables them to make more complex search requests as they become more comfortable with the system. Visually, the interface plays a secondary role. While there are design elements on the screen, they are less important than the system's content (the search results), and so are only minimally treated. This way they do not compete with the content area, or overwhelm the feeling of the music being presented. In this interface, appearance and content become one. The Nugget "A necessary and precious contribution to the web. Its innovation
is a rare union of utility and artistic expression. By classifying music
in terms of user moods or desired environment, the designer has created
a new language that emulates the way people use music." |
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