Usability Optimization and Testing Of Social Music Service

Abstract: Music playback in venues is very often controlled by the small group of people administrating the business or locale, and not by the audience of listeners themselves. The people listening rarely have any ability to affect the choice of music within the public place or business they are currently situated in. This master thesis is built around a developed social music service, that lets the listeners control the playback of music together. The project is called: Blicko, and it enables its users to collaboratively build up a playlist of music, and then vote on the order of the upcoming tracks to be played. It can be thought of as a tool which has similar functions to a jukebox. The service enables the visitors or attendees at any type of public place or venue (i.e. cafes, bars, lobby, restaurants etc.) to be a part of deciding and controlling which music is being played. The thesis is dedicated to examine the best way of refining the service, in terms of optimizing the User Experience (UX), by application of different practices and methods within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This also involves managing the complications that rises when developing a multi-platform service for a wide range of devices.