The User Experience of Mobile Music Making: An Ethnographic Exploration of Music Production and Performance in Practice

The research herein describes the investigation of usability of software and hardware tools for musicians. Through an ethnographic approach, the aim is to broaden the scope of investigation and measure the usability of tools for musicians in a real world setting. Six musicians are observed through the planning and preparation stages, rehearsals, performing and post-performance in order to better understand the tools that they use and how these tools could be improved. This work builds on previous investigations into more traditional production environments. This investigation also explores how requirements and tools have changed. The research highlights main areas of usability problems in navigation, clarity of expression, problems in understanding flow and a mismatch between requirements and software tools that currently exist. The results highlight strengths in the flexibility of such systems and identify where they solve traditional, hardware based problems. The paper culminates in a discussion regarding the values, strengths and weaknesses of hard and soft tools and points to potential future directions of research.