Case Study: Reinventing Musical Instruments
Interactive drums installation. Photo by Bruno Destombes for Moment Factory.For these two projects, which were not designed by me, the goal was to create an interactive installation where people could express their creative minds and maybe even connect with strangers. My role as the UX researcher was to determine if people would:
Understand how to use the installation;
Understand the feedback of their interactions;
Stay in the zone for the desired amount of time.
The first project, the drums installation, is located at the Toronto Zoo. It is part of an enchanted night walk installation where people get to experience different immersive settings. To evaluate the understanding of the interactive drums zone, we recreated the experience in the studio and invited people to come test it.
Users testing the installation in the studio.Observers were placed next to each drum and participant and took notes of the desired and unexpected behaviours of the users on an observation guide. Interviewers asked questions to users at the end of the experience to know more about their understanding and appreciation (we used the desirability toolkit method to test the visual appeal).
Me interviewing a user after he tested the installation.We noticed that people understood how to use the installation, but the feedback was not satisfying for most of them. Some followed the beat of the musical soundtrack and expected a reward, some did not, and others wanted to create their own beat. After a design thinking workshop, which I facilitated, we came up with a solution that encompassed most of the user's needs.
Our workshop’s board of problems and solutions. On the left are the prioritized problems, in the middle, the problems transformed into "how might we" questions, and on the right are solutions by team members. At the beginning of the experience, the entire musical soundtrack, which is composed of a melody and drum beats, is put forward. Users are free to drum as they like, following the drum beat or not. After a few minutes of playing, the melody volume is reduced and the drum beats are increased. A luminous pulse following the rhythm of the drum beat soundtrack also appears in the light dots on the ground. This allowed users to be subtly encouraged to start following the beat. After a few seconds, a climax of sound and light is triggered in the whole installation. With this solution, creative-drummers have their moment to shine at the beginning and beat-followers are satisfied to have a reward after following the beat.
The second project is also located in an enchanted night walk at a ski station in France. The installation consists of boxes with a crank that create sound and light when the crank is rotated. Our research objectives were similar to the first project, so we recreated the experience in the studio, but this time, with lower-fidelity. Only one musical crank was used and the 3 others were faked using empty equipment boxes and stools. A TV screen replaced the LED sticks used in the actual installation. This lowered the budget of the test and was enough for the users to have a sense of the actual experience.
Users testing the prototype of the musical cranks. Our results found that users very quickly abandoned the activity. At first, they enjoyed turning the crank and tested different speeds, but soon got fed up with it and left. While interviewing them, we noticed that it was not because they thought that it was not fun, but rather because again, there was a problem with feedback. When they accelerated or decelerated the rotation of the crank, the sound and lights were not changing at the same speed as their movement. We decided to make the crank more sensitive so that changes in speed were more audible and visible. We then noticed that people spent more time playing around and trying out different speeds with the musical cranks.
Sketch of the low-fidelity prototype used for the test.