RECORD

Student project: Urørt customised.

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Kristin Tobiassen’s starting point was what many users of Urørt have been missing in the existing service: the ability to customise their profile pages. Kristin writes:

Today the users who wants to be more personal and perhaps more different from the other bands, don’t have that many possibilities. You can decide fonts and colors and upload a background picture. When users are trying to find new music they might like, they get almost the same impression from every band. So if the band could be more personal it wouldn’t just give the bands a tool to use, so they can show who they are and what the band represent, it would also be more fun for the listeners to search for new music and easier for the listeners to find bands and music they might like.

Her result was a design tool to lower the threshold and enable the users to be more creative about the profile page design. To communicate how this tool works, Kristin created an extensive slide-show-prototype with a step-by-step walkthrough of how this could work. Note how she also includes how this tool can be misused.

Student Project: Urørt Gadgets

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Fan Fan investigated the possibilities for the listeners to playfully explore audio content through different small tools.

Fan Fan has designed an extendable modular interface where the user can add and remove different explorative tool according to their preferences. All the different tools integrate into a common framework, giving the tools a familiarity and a common set of interactional conventions.

For communicational purposes Fan Fan created a semi-clickable prototype, which explain how the different tools and the framework work.

Student Project: Urørt Player

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Kjetil Austvoll-Dahlgren and Eivind Bergstøl worked on a stand-alone desktop player – based on the Adobe Air technology – for Urørt, and looked specifically into new ways of discovering new music through the desktop application.

Kjetil and Eivind also faced the problem of making visual representations of audio content. They write:

Little or next to no inherent information resides in recorded music. This limits searches for music to things such as length in time and amplitude, things which can easily be read by software and is totally uninteresting for most users.The usual practice is to add a title, artist name and a genre tag, as well as perhaps location based tags.

Though this helps a long way, we find that it is not nearly enough to make the act of searching for new music worthwhile. When looking for new music, the artist name and song title means nothing to you; and by leaning on genre descriptors you limit your findings in a far too narrow manner.

Their approach to this problem is to represent each song by a colored circle. The colors represent different sorting filters like favourites, most popular and recently uploaded. By hovering over the circle you get the name of the song and the band in addition to a sound sample. This allows for a more explorative way of navigating through the content.

Read more in their design report.

Student Project: Urørt Redesign

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Ingrid Alice Clausen investigated a large re-design of Urørt, both on a visual and a more systemic level. She implemented more social features and looked at how to make the content more scanable and browsable.

Ingrid writes:

When searching or browsing for new music in the Urørt sites, the content comes across as all but glanceable and easy to keep on top of, much due to the sheer amount of it. In order to enhance the ability to take in and process the information given in the event calendar, the redesign made use of clear distinguishable colours to symbolize genres and increase the level of intuitiveness for the reader and identity for the content provider.

Particularly interesting is the use of color to annotate audio-content, making it instantly recognisable. Every tune is given a color based upon which genre the tune belongs to, opening a wealth of interesting possibilities.

See more in Ingrid’s presentation.

Student project: Urørt Stars

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Lars Marcus Vedeler looked into how to make the content of Urørt more visible for the listeners. His problem statement was:

Particularly interesting about this concept is the visualisations of other users’ routes through the content, and the ability to store and share these traces with each other. It makes movement and actions on the site visible and turns it into a social object that you can discuss and socialise around.

Lars created a non-clickable prototype in Adobe Flash, telling the story about how this could be used:

Urørt Stars is a student project by Lars Marcus Vedler done in collaboration with the RECORD project. Urørt Stars is different way of browsing through the thousands of unknown songs within the web site. By using different filters the user can emphasize his/ hers preferences in music.
You can read more about Lars’ approach, methods and reflections in his report.

Student Project: VIF-karaoke

In the autumn of 2008, students at AHO conducted a 5 week task looking into how to move from a transaction-based music store, to a store based more on richer experiences around music. See more student projects for RECORD here.

VIF-karaoke is a concept for a casual game for the diehard fans of Vålerenga football club, based around the activities taking place before matches, particularly sining.
The game let’s you customise your own avatar which represents you in the game.

The game is able to mediate a quiz- and karaoke-session for a set of dislocated friends. Play the same game without being at the same place, with your friends. The quiz is based around facts and trivia from the history of the football club. The fan-club has a wide variety of songs they offer to the karaoke game. Answer the questions correctly and know the lyrics, time and pitch of the songs to win.