Final Design Guidelines - finlayrodbert/soundtrak GitHub Wiki

From the Design Process (Phases 1 and 2), much can be learnt as to how soundtrak should be designed to provide the best experience for musicians and producers who wish to collaborate.

From Phase 1, the following list of overall design guidelines were identified:

1. soundtrak must be perceived as a legitimate tool by its target audience. Musicians and their collaborators have to be able to believe that it is of high quality and will be able to produce good results for them.
2. To maintain creative flow, soundtrak needs to allow musicians to collaborate seamlessly whenever they wish to, at a pace that suits them best.
3. Collaborating artists must be able to feel connectedness, as well as experience social presence through the conveyance of information when using soundtrak in distributed locations.
4. soundtrak must not impinge on the musical creativity and craft of its users any more than necessary. Although, some musicians will always find new ways of being creative, soundtrak should not intentionally be restrictive.
5. soundtrak should facilitate different levels of access or privilege to users in order to match their individual roles within a project. This is to ensure the cognitive load taken on by each participant in a collaboration is appropriately limited to their duty’s requirements.
6. Every feature, parameter, and option in soundtrak must be easily fine tweakable to meet a specific musician’s requirements. They need to be comfortable and make themselves feel at home in the studio.
7. soundtrak should facilitate communication between collaborators in whatever form is best suited to their unique connection’s needs and the project’s needs as a whole piece of work. It must be inherently easy for musicians to use soundtrak in their preferred way, as a collaboration tool.

These points were then further explored through the interviews, where I was able to refine them into distinctive features that could be realised in an implementation of soundtrak. Throughout the prototyping stage, some of these were modified, as some findings revealed, or otherwise approved as participants accepted their design enthusiastically.

Synchronous Collaboration This is the main defining feature of soundtrak, the driving factor behind its research and development. Synchronous Collaboration at its core, is the ability for musicians to be able to work together on the same project at the same time. The options for text, voice, video or any combination of these communication streams should be facilitated to allow clear transfer of information between contributors. Any changes made by one contributor to the project should be broadcast to all other contributors, and their working copy of the project is updated to reflect the change. This concept is inspired from the synchronous collaboration seen in google docs, in that it will allow multiple individuals to work on the same project in a session together. When working together, there needs to be control over what information is shared between participants live. Sometimes they may wish to see every effect/parameter being changed, hear the playback when someone listens to a section or hear their instrument signal coming through whilst recording is happening; but sometimes they won't so it is important for there to be control over this.

Cross-DAW Collaboration Cross-DAW Collaboration is a concept that is based on the comfort that home studio users have in working out of a workstation and software that is familiar to themselves, they have customised and set how they like it. CDC would allow soundtrak's collaborative elements to be DAW agnostic, so that each contributor could use their DAW of choice rather than one specific fixed option to open the project session in. This concept could theoretically be realised, as every DAW (at its core) is simply at presentation of audio files that make up a song, the levels and effects that are applied to each track and the mix of how they sound all together, as such, there is a lot of universally common data that could be shared between DAWs to make CDC happen; which as discovered in the interviews, could change the music making industry a bit.

Workload Management Workload Management is a new Idea that is based around control over the cognitive load that each contributor has towards a project at any one time. This comes from the problem of not everyone working on a project knowing effectively how to use all the tools of a DAW, or not needing to for their role within the collaboration. One implementation of this would be to have the administrator of a project be able to set roles and permissions for each contributor, so that they can see or access features that they wish to or need to complete their part, whilst limiting the potential for any confused user to mess with sections that they're not supposed to. This may involve, showing/disabling/hiding certain aspects of the DAW such as irrelevant parts, tracks, effect channels, levels or other parameters. For an individual working on their part who knows the ins and outs of a DAW, there is some benefit as well in locking off parts of the song they are not currently working on, mostly to reduce distraction or the opportunity for them to lose focus on the task at hand in another part of the song.

Advanced Version Control Advanced Version Control is my implementation for how multiple contributors can make individual progress on the project together or separately from one another. The concept comes from the design of Git Version Control, which has proven successful in the world of software development, where there would be a master working copy that can be worked on by itself or branched in and out of to allow individuals to work on different parts of a project asynchronously from one another and then merge the new work back together. This is particularly useful if a musician decides to focus on a specific track or task (eg. recording guitar parts or choosing the right keyboard tone) which might take a longer amount of time, and they wish to work on it without having to worry about everything else currently being worked in other parts of the song or being watched by other musicians during their task. Other features that would be facilitated by AVC would be the ability to roll back to older versions if need be, work offline, and see who is responsible for each change made in the project.

This page contains 4 main features that I have identified through the Design Process, each of these can be seen as considerations and recommendations for when designing in the domain of collaborative music making in the future.

Examples of these features in action can be seen in the Scenarios Promotional Material