Soundscapes
Soundscapes is a social media project in development by Val Masters, Zahra Rajabi, Stephanie Fielding, and Akram Wahdan. Designed as part of a course at the University of Toronto iSchool, Soundscapes seeks to provide an immersive auditory experience, direct from your smartphone. My role in this project involves data analysis and producing tangible artifacts documenting the design process.
With Soundscapes, recording, re-living, sharing, and finding new auditory worlds is simple. Read on to discover our design process.
The Beginning: Ideation, User Research & Analysis
Soundscapes started as notes on a whiteboard.
But we didn't know how our ideas would be received. So we reached out to potential users of our app: smartphone-using adults.
From left: Zahra, Akram, Val, and Stephanie.
We surveyed 35 people on our social media networks using Google Forms and conducted 6 semi-structured interviews. We started with demographics questions, and dug deeper to discover the role sound and place played in our respondents' lives, and their needs and interests for a sound-based app.
Based on thematic analysis of this data, we created a persona to represent a characteristic user of our app: Mariam.
Mariam is a practicing Muslim who is planning a trip to Mecca.
Mariam wants a novel way to record her pilgrimage because she realizes she won’t be able to go back, and she values preserving memories.
But photos aren't enough, and videos impose too much. She needs a way to preserve her experience that will enable her to truly re-live it and share with others: this is where Soundscapes comes in.
Photo by Jonathan Grado.
Sound is an untapped resource, a sense we often overlook. But sound has the power to calm us, awaken us, and show us new worlds.
Prototyping Soundscapes
Part of lean UX is starting cheap, learning from mistakes, and improving with every iteration. We sketched our first iteration on paper.
Then we took our prototype to test: we did lean usability testing with four users by asking them to do a cognitive walk-through of our paper prototype.
A user agreed to do a cognitive walk-through of our prototype, meaning she voiced her thoughts about how to navigate the app as she pointed to actionable icons.
The users we asked were all students and smartphone users between the ages of 20 and 30. After the walk-throughs, our users gave us general feedback.
We aggregated and categorized all of the feedback into likes, criticisms, questions, and ideas. We then used this feedback to construct our medium-fidelity prototype in Figma.
Evaluation & Next Steps
We began our second round of evaluation with semi-structured interviews with three new users to gain contextual information.
We then transferred our digital prototype to InVision and conducted another round of cognitive walkthroughs. InVision enabled us to import our screens and create a smartphone-ready clickable prototype.
