Black Falcon - GR1

User Classes

• College Party DJ
  • Young adults
  • Hosting parties and gatherings of similarly aged listeners
  • Voluntary service
• Professional DJ
  • Experienced and well-versed in the DJ community
  • Gets paid to DJ
• Radio DJ
  • DJs on the radio
  • Playing blind to an unknown audience

Observations & Interviews

Interview No.1 - College DJ

Interviewee #1 began DJing about 2 years ago, after getting more and more interested in the profession while in high school and actually attending parties at MIT. Joining a fraternity gave him the opportunity to perform and play music for people at the school and provide a positive atmosphere for students to enjoy the festivities. However, while maintaining equipment, volume, and music quality, it is hard for him to gauge the audience and get feedback on how he’s doing as DJ.

Backed up with song requests and unable to add some of his original flavor into the songs, he finds that the college DJ has a much harder job than it might appear. The main method he uses to get a feel for how the crowd is enjoying his music is to react to expressions from people, listening for audio clues as to what the audience is feeling at the time. Owning both Android phone and tablet, he is technologically equipped to handle many different software based tasks while working the booth.

What we learned:

• it is hard to gauge satisfaction of an audience
• it is difficult to get feedback on his performance as a DJ
• he resorts to looking at expressions of the audience to see how they feel

Interview No.2 - Professional DJ

Interviewee #2 has been DJing for about 8 years. He was raised around music, and even played a few instruments including saxophone and piano. He prides himself in his vast collection of music, and very much enjoys finding new remixes, of songs. He feels a great sense of joy playing music for people, and rekindling any past emotional ties his crowd feels with certain songs. 

One of the problems he faces though, is choosing which song will entertain his crowd. Often times he is thrown into an event without any idea of what music to play, and what the crowd will respond to. Approaching a job in which he gets paid  with trial and error is a hard enough task, without having to read a crowds emotions. It becomes even more difficult as he immerses himself in his work, and trying to make smooth transitions. 

He also finds it difficult when people come up and try to suggest a song because it will either ruin the vibe currently going on, or is a song that has already been played.

What we learned:

• the DJ really has an appreciation and love of music and want to share it with his audience
• it is hard to select songs to entertain a crowd
• he resorts to looking at expressions of the audience to see how they feel
• it is difficult to look at the audience while managing songs
• users submit uninformed song requests

Interview No.3 - Radio DJ

Interviewee #3 has been DJing for 7 years. He really likes DJing because he gets to share many different styles of music with his audiences. He finds gigs either through friend recommendations or personal requests from people who have heard him dj.
He faces a few difficulties while DJing. He has to make sure the sound levels are correct , make sure the the entire crowd is satisfied with the music selection, and respond adequately to song requests. He mentioned that, when DJing for the radio, he faced additional constraints. For the radio, you have to make sure that the songs don’t have inappropriate words in them. It’s also more difficult to judge how the audience is responding because there is no visual feedback. The only feedback comes from people who phone in.

He uses many methods of getting feedback from his audience. When he DJs at parties, he can look out into the crowd to see how many people are dancing, hear how many people are singing the song, and generally gauge satisfaction by the sound level of the audience. For the radio, he gets feedback through the phone calls that he gets during the show. He also listens to the show twice after each show. This is a particularly interesting hack because he basically puts himself in the role of the user after the show to see how engaged he was with his music selections.

He also mentioned some selections of what he would want as feedback. He said that song ratings would not be terribly useful because people like different things and the ratings might be biased if the listener had never heard the song before. He suggested a sort of satisfaction rating by show segments. Just to know if the user was generally satisfied with the music for a certain period of time.

He doesn’t have a tablet or a smartphone, but he does own an itouch.

What we learned:

• it is hard both satisfy and gauge the satisfaction of an entire crowd
• it is difficult to respond to song requests
• For the radio, DJs must filter out inappropriate words
  

Needs & Goals

Based on our observations, we have identified the following goals for our user classes.

College DJ

• Get better information about current trending song popularity amongst party-goers
• Find a way to stablely monitor volume levels
• Accurately visualize the crowd’s moods and attitude

Professional DJ

• Allow the audience to unobtrusively provide feedback ( So the Dj does not get distracted, and so guests stay attentive to party)
• Give audience information about current vibe of the party and which songs have been played to get better song requests
• Select quality songs for an event with limited information about the crowd

Radio DJ

• Gauge the satisfaction of the entire crowd
• Unobtrusively deal with song requests
• Find an efficient way to filter out bad words from songs