Evaluating an avatar-based user interface for discovering new music
Jukka Holm, Arto Lehtiniemi, Antti Eronen · 2010
This paper studies the idea of using avatars as a user interface for discovering new music. In the evaluated prototype, the user builds an avatar from three parts (head, body and background). The appearance of each part reflects a certain musical genre. Based on the selected combination of parts, the application generates a new playlist of music by seeding a content-based music recommender with examples from the selected genres. In a user study with 40 participants, the prototype was considered to be entertaining and easy to use. The concept inspired users to explore new music and provided faster access to cross-genre playlists than traditional music player applications. In the longer term use, the prototype was slightly too simple and it would have benefited from, e.g., text-based search functionality. Several other interesting ideas for the future development of the concept were also received.