Shiva is a product and 3D designer bringing ideas to life and the intersection of digital design and physical products. 3D Designer at 404-GEN and currently based in Brooklyn NY.
Spectrogram Hero Design
Timeline: January - April 2024
Team: Shiva V., Victor Minces, Akshay Nagarajan
Role: UX Designer, and Prototyper
Skills: Figma, Rapid Prototyping, Design Thinking
The Problem Statement:
Students in lower income communities are falling behind in educational topics such as science. How can we entice the students to learn new concepts about sound using the spectrogram tool?
Target Users?
The two stakeholders in this project are both teachers and the students. Teachers are the facilitators of the curriculum and so they must be incentivized in order to teach it and have the students absorb as much as they can from the learning. It’s a balance between usability from the teachers and engagement from students.
The Tools/Approach
As a part of this project, I collaborated with researcher Victor Minces and Ph.D resident Akshay Nagarajan to harness the spectrogram project to teach the science of music and sound. We took inspiration from a previous game, Bird Song Hero, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to focus our design around.
DISCLAIMER: Many of the designs are built on the previous previous UI that Spectrogram was built on to better reflect the final product if coded by the UCSD team.
Adapting our Approach
While we played around with adapting Spectrogram to a Bird Song Hero style game, we also experimented with having students actively play with the spectrogram live in class. Based on user feedback from teachers, we understood that our game should be three things: easy to setup, low maintenance, engaging for both students and teachers.
Early Prototypes/Proof of Concept
We first began by detailing basic game mechanics in a quiz like scenario. We included in the initial draft of our design plans that the teachers would allow students to get first hand experience with the spectrogram before moving onto the quiz. We simplified the quiz to be easy for students to answer and required minimal assistance from teachers. From the research, we needed to make the user feel autonomous using the spectrogram.
Design Challenges
From our intial research into sound design, we wanted to hone in some key factors that we wanted to keep in scope. We first wanted to keep the sound design/files grounded in reality with instruments/MIDI that could be transferred to other skills later. The other issue we ran into was that many people have trouble with a constant pitch/tone so we needed to different references that creates waves or shifts in the pitch for users to grasp onto. This is why many of the graphs are not a straight line and variation in the sound profile.
Increasing Difficulty
While there are some bad game design practices we could not cross such as asking users to determine a certain pitch, we did want to change the sounds to be increasingly harder and for students to look deeper into the spectrogram for the answers. We would change the source of sounds but also have a live spectrogram for students to see how their own voice and pitch would effect it and use those learnings on their answer.
Working with Constraints
While the intent is to teach sound, we are grounding it in the tool of the spectrogram. It’s an easy educational tool for teachers to use while having the feedback to engage students. We don’t want the session of teaching the spectrogram to be chaotic for the teachers, but we still want to encourage students in and out of the classroom to use the spectrogram.
Current Stage
We are still working on the prototype before we decide to implement it into the site. Much more research and working with users is required before we can push the development. It is a work in progress prototype but we hope to be able to make this a free resource for all schools.
Question
Answer
Takeaways and Next Steps
Currently Victor Minces, Akshay Nagarajan and the UCSD Cognitive Science Department are still working on implimenting the spectrogram into teaching curriculum. I worked for a total of 4 months on this project with prototyping and understanding the scope of implimentation. Balancing stakeholders with conflicting interests has changed the output of this project, but Spectrogram Hero is transforming into a valuable tool for sound science.
Few of the key lessons learned:
- Research and design decisions can conflict.
- Stakeholders can be balanced together to create a cohesive package.
Next Steps:
- Develop the game within the spectrogram app.
- Add more features to include the spectrogram with the game.
- Refine prototypes.