Individual

assignment
DM2601

Magdalena Okurowska
moku@kth.se
Group B6
Magdalena Okurowska
moku@kth.se

During this project I’ve learned a lot of useful things. In the other project-based courses that I
had before we had different approach to the given task. From the beginning we started to
think about the ideas of the product and how to realize them. In some way we always skipped
the discover and define part or just adjusted it to our main product idea. During this course I
understood the meaning of all the steps and the double diamond theory facilitated
understanding.

The story of our project starts with first kick off meeting. It gave us possibility to ask initial
key questions like “Who will use it?” or “What is the product?” (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, &
Noessel, 2014). To make our work simpler, we decided to improve in some way Spotify.
Every one of us was a frequent user of this platform so in this way we could skip the
familiarization phase with this product. We studied also different context of listening of music
to understand more our users. During this meeting we decided to focus on one area in this
platform – Spotify Running.

In the middle of the course we realized that we misunderstood the individual written
assignment. In the first phases we never used four methods where each of us were responsible
of. Instead we just fully used the methods that we thought were suitable to our project. The
methods were: interviews, surveys and state of the art analysis. There are only three of them,
so I would like to describe other methods that we could use instead.

The first of methods is literature review that is not only collection of summaries of papers of
several research but also “the use of ideas in the literature to justify the particular approach to
the topic” (Yair Levy, 2006). Literature review can provide a firm foundation to a research
topic and methodology. It helps to understand the existing knowledge in the topic and where
new research is needed. This type of method is requiring a lot of time for reading and analysis
of papers but is also effective when we want to get a good perspective on already conducted
research in this area. Implementing this method is for free in most of the cases. The internet
made it possible to access different studies from all over the world. Sometimes there is need
to incur costs in order to read some studies but most of them are free of charge. Literature
study can be useful in some academical researches when information about previous studies is
necessary to get a good background in the topic.

In our case the literature study should be conducted in the beginning of the project. This
method would help us understand better why people listen to music while exercising and why
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they are exercising at all. This information would be usable to understand the user of the
product and theirs habits. The study would give us a better foundation for our research and
wider perspective on topics. We could also find some challenging problems with running with
music. Most of the studies are carried out using interviews, surveys or focus groups. If we
would embrace this method, we could take a part of the information. According to Yari Levy,
a professor of information systems and cybersecurity from Nova Southeastern University in
Florida, the literature search process should be done continuously during the study (Yair
Levy, 2006). That’s why in our project we used this method during later designing process in
order to get more understanding for different areas and issues.

Next method that I would like talk about is contextual inquiry which is much easier because
instead of asking interviewee a lot of question, our task is only to watch and observe when
they are doing their work (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). In our case it would be very hard
because we would have to run together with interviewee and there would be no time to take
notes. Also, another problem is that we could not hear the music they listen to or see their
mobile screen in order to examine how they listen to music and what interaction they are
doing on a mobile. In some way we could apply this method in the gym but still the issue with
trucking the phone remains. That’s why this method is not fitting to our project.

According to Beyer and Holtzblatt there is four basic principles of engaging ethnographic
interviews. This first one is context. They describe that it’s better to observing users in their
own environment as they perform activities rather than interviewing them in a clean white
room. The second is partnership where “the interview and observation should take the tone of
collaborative exploration with the user (…)” (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, & Noessel, 2014).
Later comes interpretation where designer have to read between the lines and observe users’
behaviours in order to analyse them to uncover the design implications. The last one principle
is focus where rather than come to interview overprepared we should subtly direct the
interview in order to capture relevant data.

Other type of qualitative research is focus groups. This is a standard technique in traditional
product marketing. Representative users are gathered in a room and asked to discuss a topic or
use a product. It’s quite useful in gathering initial reactions to a product but according to
authors of “About face” book this method can be inappropriate as an interaction design tool.
According to them, this method is weak in gathering data about what people actually do with
the product and how or why they do it. Also, the loudest opinion often becomes the group
opinion so other users would not have the possibility to express their feelings (Cooper,
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moku@kth.se

Reimann, Cronin, & Noessel, 2014). In our project this method would work in the later phase
of the project like development. It’s the point where we have our hi-fi prototype where users
could interact with it and express their opinions. We could also just present the Spotify app
with running feature and let the users discuss it. It could reveal areas where this product is not
really functional and what is that they like.

The next research method is usability testing which measures how well users can complete
certain task on a product. It helps also to find problems in design where users have problem to
understanding the product (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, & Noessel, 2014). Usability testing
method were used in our project in the develop phase where my other colleague was
responsible of. However, we could also use it in the discovery phase which could help us to
find several design issues in current product which is Spotify running. Authors of earlier
mentioned book writes that if the budget of the project is limited so they find this method
much more valuable when they have a candidate solution (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, &
Noessel, 2014). I interpret it as this method is pretty costly to implement in real life projects
which is a big disadvantage but also, it’s so valuable in research that it’s still worth to
implement.

The next phase of our project is called Define. During earlier phase we discovered the
possibilities in Spotify running and overall in running as a sport through surveys and
interviews. We got a god research ground to go to the next phase of defining our project.
After gathering and investigating our user’s motivations and environs we went to the next step
of modelling users. The ‘personas’ is very powerful design tool that helps to understand the
users of a product. It also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design
that otherwise often go unexamined (Grudin & Pruitt, 2002). According to Grudin and Pruitt,
researchers from Microsoft, personas has a lot of benefits. Once created, they help to keep the
assumptions and decision-making criteria clear. They create a strong focus on users and help
designers to focus on questions like “Why are we building this feature?”. This method helps
to establish who the product is designed for. They also point out the risk of personas. They
mean that sometimes an organisation or others can overuse personas that can be used to
replace other user-centered methods like data collection and product evaluation (Grudin &
Pruitt, 2002).

In our project personas helped to understand who are we designing for and what requirements
should this design have. We created our personas with help of our interviews in the discovery
phase. In order to cover several types of users we created two personas with different
Magdalena Okurowska
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scenarios, goals and expectations. The first one is a 24 years old girl, Kim. She likes to sport
because it makes her happy and energized. She is the typical fitness girl who stays fit and
listens to music to get a boost while training. We created also a persona that is quite opposite
of the first one. It’s Jonathan that is 27 years old and likes to play video games and watch
movies with his girlfriend. He feels like he needs to exercise but he doesn’t love it. He wants
to stay fit without becoming an older fat man in his middle age. In this case the music makes
the training bearable and more fun.

Authors of book called About face points out what design pitfalls personas helps to avoid.
One of them is self-referential design. It occurs when designers project their own goals,
motivations or skills onto a product’s design. I think that this is the most common problem
when designing a product (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, & Noessel, 2014). A lot of younger
designers like us don’t have yet the good perspective on design process. We can focus more
on what we would like to have in our product then adjusting it for our personas or real users.
This can affect the result of the project and create risk that the final product mismatch the
target group. There is also a disadvantage in the fact that most of project members are
frequent users of Spotify. This can make us blind while finding features that could be
improved. It’s also the trust in company as Spotify who is very popular and respectable that
can affect our judgement of their products. That’s why choosing a unknow music service
would be a better option in the future.

Creating personas helped us to focus on our target group and our users rather than on
ourselves. Like I mentioned before our personas are based on a real people from our previous
research. Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, & Noessel mention in their book that personas should be
based on real-world observation which we created. They also discuss thay beside a persona,
who is potentiall user of the product, it’s useful to create also a persona that do not use the
product but must be considered in the design process. Their example is a persona, called
customer persona, that buys a toy not for himself but for a baby (Cooper, Reimann, Cronin, &
Noessel, 2014). Looking at this, from our project perspective, we should have also a persona
that is not using music att all druing exerciseing. It would show us the rasons why someone
leaves his/hers headphones at home and skips the music during running. This persona could
wide our perspective on music and our product.

After Define phase we started to developing our product. We began with some lo-fi sketches
and brainstorming where we used a lot of techniques. We created also a moodboard and a
mindmap to clearify our design requriements and users needs. In order to get deeper
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understanding in training apps and their features we made state of the art of very popular
training app – Runkeeper. In this way we could study the functions in a running application
which would help us to develop our product in a good way. During this process we created
three main ideas. The first one was to adapt music to your rhythm by increasing or decreasing
depending on your tempo by either reading your BMP or using GPS and step counter. The
second was to adapt yourself to music by training program where you can set the time of the
training and where you want to have a specific BPM. Useful in interval training where you
can set the running BPM and cooldown BPM. The last one was to adapt the music to mood
where music genre adapts to your mood in the training. There either your phone would read
your mood, or you could insert your mood manually. The last idea was very innovative and
interesting according to our supervisor and us but in the end, we decided to skip it because it
felt like a hard idea to develop and show in a prototype and our course. We didn’t have the
possibility to mediate our vision because of technical limitations. There was also a problem
with possible interaction. The idea about your mobile reading through data your actual mood
is very cool but isn’t there a thin line between privacy and data used for this? Or maybe the
mood read by your mobile isn’t the real mood you want to feel? When you are sad sometimes
you want to remain sad or you just want to be cheered up. The phone doesn’t know our
humans desire and that’s why we did proceed with this idea. It would be impossible to make
our users satisfied with this product.

After getting some first proposal ideas for our first iterations of prototype we created two
different hifidelity prototypes based on first two ideas. I will describe them briefly in order to
understand my evaluation methods which I was resposible for. The first protype was feature
that adjusted the music to your pace in real-time. We wanted also to make it possible for our
users to choose their own favorite music and not only be limited to Spotifys suggestions and
mixes. All prototyping was made in JustInMind and Photoshop.

The second prototype was based on our next idea where a user would adjust runtempo to the
music. This feature makes it possible for user to set the training program where they can
adjust time and level of the run. You can also set different intervals where music will adjust
to. It makes the interaction with the mobile avoided during runnning because you will hear
when is the time to change your speed due to change of music. The user have possiblity to
choose fast, steady or slow run for every interval that is time adjusted with sliders. Instead of
normal music timeline we integrated additionally intervals if a user woould like to se how
much it’s left of the training.
Magdalena Okurowska
moku@kth.se

After first iteration of the prototypes we got an idea of improving the first prototype. We
wanted to make it more interactive and added an extra innovative feature. The problem in the
first prototype was that it wasn’t giving any boost while running. When user would run
slower, the music would be slower so no boost and cheer up would occur. To avoid this, we
added the “tap” feature that makes it possible to lock the tempo. While running user need to
tap once on the phone to lock the tempo. In this way the music will not slow down even if the
user runs slower. If he/she runs faster, the minimum pace will get higher. It will give runner
the boost needed to keep up. After the run user have possibility to check statistics in lower left
corner of the screen.

In the end of the developing phase it was only one question remaining. Which prototype is
better? To get an answer we used several techniques to evaluate both prototypes. I was in
charge of two of them, reaction evaluation cards and Harris profile. The second mentioned
method is a graphic presentation of strength and weakness of design concepts where the
designers evaluate them. This method can be useful during each phases of the design process
but is typically used when designers have several concepts in order to eliminate some of them
(Harris, 1961). That’s why me and my group used this method. We needed to compare those
two ideas according to our design requirements that we created in the beginning of the
Magdalena Okurowska
moku@kth.se

project. In the beginning we established our requirements because while the concepts are in
development the requirements can change.

The Harris profile helped us to realize which of the concepts are the one that fulfil most of our
requirements. The second prototype with “tap” function is the winner of this evaluation, but
this method has some limitations. The four-point scale should be interpreted differently for
every requirement and are not really comparable. We, as the design team, worked also on this
project long time and can’t really objective look at those concepts.

The other method that we used in our evaluation process was reaction card method. During
our workshop session we presented both concepts to a group of students and asked them later
to choose two words from the table made of 118 words. Table consisted a lot of describing
word like empowering, disconnected, stable, friendly or irrelevant. This method was first
introduced by Joey Benedeck and Trish Miner in 2002. They studied new methods for
evaluation of desirability on behalf of Microsoft, that’s why this method is called also
“Microsoft reaction cards” (Meyer, 2019).

Three persons answered with two adjectives for every concept. Out first concept, where music
adjusted to your bmp, got words like fresh, ordinary, time saving, helpful, dull, powerful and
satisfying. The ordinary word come up two times and the rest once. The second concepts got
words like controllable, customizable, creative, straight forward and flexible, where creative
come up twice. Through this we can conclude that users thought that the second concept was
more interesting than the first one. But our ability to present our concepts and visions could
affect results of this method. The second prototype was practically done and very easy to
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understand. However, the first prototype could be just demonstrated by us and our
explanations because we were unable to implement “tap function”. Some part of users maybe
couldn’t understand fully this function and liked more other version of the application. This
method shows clearly users feeling without talking about functionality or features. It’s a good
way to get first simple feedback of their feelings because they don’t even have to interact with
design. A small briefing is enough to have the first opinion on a product. The downside is
that, as researchers, we want to go deeper and understand what and why those adjectives came
up. This method doesn’t explain why the users are thinking in this way and it’s up to us to
analyse their thoughts.

After consideration and conducing other evaluation methods we decided to improve and
further develop concept with “tap” function. The reaction card method showed us that users
will get confused about the “tap”-function and not really understand it. That’s why we
decided to create a tutorial with explanation of this function. We skipped also the statistic
which would convert a music app into a training app and that wasn’t our intention.

During this project I learned a lot about methods and approach of developing a product. My
methods that I was working with contributed a lot to the development of todays prototype.
Personas made it possible to understand the user and keep focus on who we develop the
product for. Evaluation methods that I mentioned earlier helped us to understand what users
feel and think. Both were a good fit together because they also helped us to realise how both
prototypes fulfilled our requirements from the beginning. Thanks to them we got both
feedback from users and us as designers which complete each other. I feel that we missed to
do more research in the first phase of this project.

More literature studies and other research methods should be implemented to get a broader
perspective on running with music. More usability testings than we had would give us a better
feedback in order to develop our prototype. Other research methods could be implemented if
we hade more time and resources. One of them that I would like to do is “Day in the life”. It’s
a study where designer observes the participant to understand the activities from the
participant’s point of view (mediaLABamsterdam, u.d.). In our case we should follow a
runner in their daily training which would gave us more understanding in their everyday
struggle with music listening during running. This method would give us the possibility of
collecting insights and design opportunities. We spend a lot of time on brainstorming and
prototyping which is good. This gave us a lot of innovative ideas to go further with in the
other phases. If I did the same project again I would spend more time on several research
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moku@kth.se

methods and evaluation methods because they gave good ground in the research and great
feedback from real users. Overall, I’m satisfied with our product and the time we spend on
developing it. This course will help me to understand more methods and the whole process.

References
Beyer, H., & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San
Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D., & Noessel, C. (2014). About face. Indianapolis, Indiana: John
Wiley & Sons.

Grudin, J., & Pruitt, J. (2002). Personas. Participatory Design and Product Development:. Proceedings
of the Participatory Design, (p. 9). Malmö, Sweden.

Harris, J. S. (1961). New Product Profile Chart. Chemical and Engineering News, 110-118.

mediaLABamsterdam. (n.d.). mediaLABamsterdam. Retrieved from

https://medialabamsterdam.com/toolkit/method-card/day-in-the-life/

Meyer, K. (2019, February 28). nngroup. Retrieved from

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microsoft-desirability-toolkit/

Yair Levy, T. J. (2006). A Systems Approach to Conduct Effective Literature Review in Support of
Information Systems Research. Informing Science Journal, 9. Retrieved September 29, 2017,
from
http://www.scs.ryerson.ca/aferworn/courses/CP8101/CLASSES/ConductingLiteratureReview.
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