Assignment 3: Contextual Inquiry

James Yoon

Digital Humanities 110: User Experience and Design (S’22)

Research Goal and Requirements

Main Activity

I want Ultimate-Guitar to be a website that both beginner and advanced guitar players can use to find guitar tabs and to learn from the community (videos, forums, courses).

Basic Need/Goal

I envision Ultimate-Guitar to be fulfilling aesthetic needs within Maslow’s hierarchy. Furthermore, learning guitar on your own or with a teacher can also fulfill Esteem needs, as the work that they put into it may boost their self-confidence.

Traditional Solutions & Limitations

There are a couple of solutions currently available, each with their own limitations.

[Current] Ultimate Guitar

YouTube/Video Hosting

Traditional Guitar Lessons

Target Users

The users I want to target are older young adults to middle-aged guitar players with a wide range of guitar playing expertise and genre preferences. If I were to narrow my target user even more, I’d want to focus on beginner guitar players or instrumentalists (particularly pianists and ukelele players, since Ultimate-Guitar also contains tabs for those instruments) who briefly tried guitar in the past, since it appears that Ultimate-Guitar in its current iteration is more conducive to advanced players.

These users would typically use this website to prepare for upcoming performances or to keep their mind busy. They may use this website either alone (e.g. practicing guitar at home) or in groups (an ensemble, a guitar class, etc…).

To complete this activity, they’d have to get a guitar by buying or renting one; create a group ensemble (if they are interested); learn guitar chord fingerings through the website or another resource; learn basic music theory (tempo, key signature, how to play in groups, how to watch a conductor, measures, chords); and practice basic strumming on the guitar.

Qualitative Research Methodology

I chose to research through two methods: overt non-participant observation and an interview/contextual inquiry. I conducted the interview first, followed by the observation to supplement my findings.

I chose to observe a small group ensemble rehearsal on Saturday, April 16th at 5 PM PDT. The rehearsal took place in UCLA’s Schoenberg Music Building, and the ensemble was going to be the pit for an upcoming play. The ensemble consisted of a bass player, a pianist, a percussionist, a wind player, and a trombonist, along with the conductor. I interviewed the pianist (21M) who revealed they had played drums and guitar before for thirty minutes, followed by observing how the musicians interacted with their sheet music (notations) and how they played in groups for thirty minutes. I recorded the interview and the activities through voice recording, and my observations were compiled in field notes on my tablet.

Dataset

Note: All the recordings have been uploaded to my SoundCloud.

Interview Picture

Reflection

Initial Thoughts

Overall, I thought the interview went well. The interview initially focused on keyboard and piano, just because he was the pianist (and Ultimate-Guitar actually does have Piano tabs, along with Guitar and Ukelele), but he did end up mentioning Ultimate-Guitar and his prior experience playing and learning guitar as the interview went on. I thought he made excellent points that I never thought about in regards to music theory, the ability to play with a backing track at certain speeds, lyrics and chords within sheet music, and the accessibility of classical music on IMSLP versus pop songs and rock songs potentially being hidden under a paywall.

Here are some quotes I found especially interesting.

And so practice wasn’t a part of my daily schedule. Partly because I didn’t have an instrument like a keyboard in my dorm or my apartment to practice and to practice with. So what was the original question again?

I’m not sure if my website could solve this, but it appears that part of the reason why people stop playing guitar/instruments is the lack of accessibility, both in terms of obtaining/renting and maintaining an instrument.

Piano, for this, I mean, I wish I tried to practice, you know, 45 minutes per day on this…on this stuff. And then this is the only instrument I can…I feel confident…like that I can play this in actual settings. You know, drums I play for fun. I played for my church every Sunday but like you know, churches are very informal…not informal, but like it’s a very forgiving environment: if you mess up, or if you’re not perfect, it is not the end of the world.

Users may practice their instrument in a wide variety of situations. Some may be proficient in guitar/piano/ukelele and want to perform professionally or in academic circles. Others might perform informally at church groups/social gatherings. I would want my app to tailor to all audiences while providing more skilled users the ability to skip tutorials/beginner information.

Yeah. I mean, like…nowadays, when I want to learn something for fun, it’ll usually be like, some sort of classical piece, I’ll just go in IMSLP and download the sheet music on my laptop and like, try and like balance it on my keyboard, because I don’t have a music stand like here. Just trying to scroll.

But if you wanted to learn, like, if a kid wanted to, like, look up, like, you know how to play their favorite pop song, it’s a little harder to get to see something like you can like, look up the chords and guitar tabs or whatever. But like, sometimes kids don’t know how to read chords, you know, and they want to, like, look at the actual sheet music. In some ways they’re a little hard to find. I mean, they’re online, you just got to, you got it buy them, which is like not the worst thing in the world.

Classical music has a mix of accessibility. On one hand, sheet music for most instruments is available on IMSLP, but only those with classically trained backgrounds can actually play these pieces since it’s all in sheet music. I envision guitar tabs to be more accessible than classical music (which includes classical guitar), but as the participant mentions later on, many guitar tabs are behind a paywall.

And so I actually looked a lot at…they give the chord markings here. And so they helped me with sight-reading actually quite a bit. In that when I was trying to, like go through, like, I might not play as perfectly, but like, okay, that’s G as F, that’s E minor. It’s like, it’s like walking down. And so that’s easy for me to conceptualize. And from there, I can be like: “Okay, so like…I don’t know how to explain it. But it’s sort of like scaffolds, like what I’m looking at on the page.”

Without me prompting him, he starts talking about chords (which is applicable as a guitar player and analogous to guitar tabs). It seems that having chords allows him as a primary pianist to scaffold his pieces, which can help with sheet music. Perhaps Ultimate-Guitar could provide both sheet music and chords for piano tabs?

“Here’s the lesson at the beginning of the book, and then here’s some like worksheets do by next week, like make sure you like do this worksheet, you know, you write out these voice leadings or whatever and like, talking about first inversion, second inversion, third inversion, things like that.

He was classically trained in piano and music theory. Unfortunately, not all users will have this same expertise, although I imagine a large subset will be novice guitar players who have some experience in other instruments and theory (like the interviewee). There needs to be a balance between providing enough theory knowledge so that anyone can pick up guitar, while acknowledging that many people come in with extensive knowledge already.

I think YouTube is helpful in that way. Because I don’t think Spotify has a slowdown feature. But for like this, specifically, I used Spotify.

This quote was in relation to YouTube having a slowdown feature and Spotify not having one. Allowing for users to playback what the tab should sound like (and perhaps the lyrics along with them) would help users find the appropriate tempo and rhythm. Speed would provide users with enough flexibility to play it at their own pace.

I think a lot of it comes from…I don’t know, just like, either your friends, like I listen to something that’s cool. Or like, “Oh, I really enjoy a song I hear and like, that’s like a cool beat. You know, I kind of want to emulate that on drums.” I think the more you try to emulate people who’ve done things in the past, the better you get at.

This statement highlights the importance of having a community tab or a videos tab. Without one, people may only practice or search for music that they are familiar with. By exploring what other people (including friends!) are playing, users can expand their music interests while learning new songs they haven’t heard of before. I’m thinking that the forum feature that Ultimate-Guitar has isn’t the most important feature in the site, but it does play an important role.

It was like Ultimate Guitar Tabs. I think someone has my phone right now. That was the main one, I think, pretty much solely that for most things. Because they had the feature to like transpose, which is like I found to be helpful, because like, I don’t have a capo for a while. And so it was like it. This is like, okay, capo 2, let me just push this up to, you know, two half steps, and then play that instead of the actual chords.

It’s awesome that my interviewee had experience using my website of interest! He highlights the importance of transposition, which is something that people without guitar capos would need to play a song in the correct pitch. I do want to note that transposition would likely be accessible to people with higher music theory knowledge than absolute theory beginners though.

I mean, the rater system of whether or not tab is good was sometimes misleading. Because like, oh, this, this tab up four and a half out of five stars must be good. Like I look at it and like…this is not correct. Something is wrong, like these are like that is not equal, or they’re like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. So those were some problems.

The rating system was also one thing I was looking at during my usability testing. It appears that because it is crowd-sourced, the actual value/accuracy of these tabs is highly subjective, and some songs may have very few ratings due to their lower popularity. I’m not sure how to fix this from a design perspective, but perhaps providing users with the ability to go to another tab of the same song more easily if the one they selected is inaccurate?

Observation Thoughts

During my overt observation, I sat in the back of the rehearsal room and took notes about how the players interacted with each other, their sheet music, and the conductor.

During the rehearsal, the conductor and the instrumentalists mentioned terms like abridged concert version, time signature, pick-up note, and measure/bar. These might be words that are relevant to guitar music and tabs, and beginners may not understand what they mean when they encounter them. Perhaps there should be tutorials or resources that they could access easily in the case that they are unfamiliar with these terms.

More importantly, I looked at how they interacted with their sheet music. The trombonist and the wind player both had pencils on their music stands/ears, and they would constantly mark their sheet music with measure bars (e.g. measure 70), notes/accidentals, and tempos. I would want guitar tabs and piano tabs to have that same functionality: for users to interact and mark their own music with their notes.

Finally, I found it interesting that 5 of the 6 players raised their hands when the conductor asked how many of them listened to the soundtrack. (It is possible that the sixth player raised their hand but that I didn’t catch it). This highlights how important playing to a track is. If established musicians like these rely on music tracks for sight-reading (on YouTube or Spotify), beginners might want that same functionality as well. This should be a major component of these guitar tabs.

Lessons Learned

My strengths/weaknesses during the procedure were as follows: