Question
What can Gobbler provide to enable and empower musical collaboration?
Research Process
By speaking with musicians and consulting academic literature on the nature of collaboration, we identified the major components required to collaborate. After performing some competitive analysis, we identified Gobbler’s position and targeted the design to where the needs of musicians overlapped with Gobbler’s strengths.
Design Strategy
Enable robust communication, asset sharing, and task management to engage users. Leverage Gobbler’s core technologies to provide speed and convenience of transfer, while rounding out the experience to include emerging market standards such as communication and task management.
Suggestions
1. Integrate as much of the collaborative process as possible under the Gobbler brand.
Research Process
Interviews and contextual inquiry revealed the 5 stages of collaboration: pre-engagement, planning, creation, sharing, and communication. Musicians demonstrated considerable resistance to changing the process of their actual creation. Gobbler stakeholders displayed active resistance to entering the world of pre-engagement.
Design Strategy
Unify on the Gobbler platform the best aspects of all the various tools currently used by musicians to plan, share, and communicate. By giving musicians everything they need to succeed, Gobbler can bring ease and efficiency to the collaborative process, creating emotional engagement and brand loyalty.
2. Planning - must include explicit place to gather and log the completion of various tasks related to a project.
Research Process
Again and again we received accounts of the "flakiness" of musicians. When collaborating remotely, simple one-time communication of a task that needs to be completed is inadequate - people lose track of the work and forget to get things done. Everyone we spoke to attested to the need for proper organization and task management when working on a project.
Design Strategy
With Gobbler's stakeholders still doubting the benefit of investing in proper task management functionality, we suggested at least including very basic listing of tasks that need to be accomplished with the ability to check them off on completion. This simple additions brings a visualization of the progress made on a project and makes it harder for collaborators to lose track of their tasks.
3. Sharing - allow for seamless uploading of changes without having to open the web application.
Research Process
Sending files back and forth lies at the heart of remote collaboration. Currently musicians must disrupt their creative flow to open an email client or a web service that provides nothing beyond simple upload and download. There exists a strong desire for more robust functionality, and a product that is particularly geared towards the transfer of audio files.
Design Strategy
Gobbler should allow for seamless uploading of changes to a project without having to disrupt the musician's creative flow. With the Web App, Gobbler must include asset versioning to track the history of the project and playback of uploaded assets to allow for previewing before downloading. We also suggest the development of public links to assets to create a self-evangelizing effect.
4. Communication - support quick, time-sensitive messaging, as well as specific notes and notifications of changes to projects.
Research Process
Contextual inquiry revealed a need for synchronous communication of time-sensitive tasks or changes that could not wait. This type of communication proved inappropriate, however, for more specific notes about particular assets. Finally, a strong desire was demonstrated for a clear history of actions taken and real-time notifications of changes across all projects.
Design Strategy
Engage users familiarity of conventions by providing a chatbox for time-sensistive communication, time-stamped comments for asset-specific notes, and drop-down notifications for logging and alerting the user to changes. By sticking to well established forms, Gobbler can provide robust functionality without requiring the user to learn anything new allowing for maximum accessbility.
