Introduction
This assignment was a continuation of last week’s activities. After designing the visuals of the fitness tracking app, we now had to do the non-visual feedback, using sounds made by ourselves. The sounds went through feedback sessions with classmates, and changed according to the evaluations. We had to design the sounds for the following functionalities:
- Basic controls (start/stop tracking)
- Feedback
- Go faster
- Go slower
- Sip some water
- Exercise complete / milestone reached
The results can be seen (heard?) below:
Prototypes
The “start and stop run” sounds were made using only my mouth, by “popping” my lips together in different pitches.
Start run
Stop run
Then I hit two paper tubes against each other to produce the “speed up” and “slow down” sounds.
Go faster
Go slower
I used a plastic cup and some water to make a “Drink some water” sound.
Sip some water
And lastly, I whistled a little melody to make the “exercise complete” sound.
Exercise complete
After the feedback session I decided to change the “Go faster” and “Go slower” sounds by whispering sounds with my mouth and either slowing them down or speeding them up on Adobe Audition Pro to come up with the desired feeling.
Post feedback “Go faster”
Post feedback “Go slower”
I also decided to change the "sip some water sound:"
Post feedback "Sip some water"
Evaluation
During the feedback session one comment most of my classmates made was that the “go faster” and “go slower” sounds were too basic, not resembling what they’re meant for. They also pointed out that my “sip some water” sound was too rushed. I ended up slowing it down to the original speed, but cutting it a bit short.
Findings
It was very nice to have feedback from my classmates, as I would not have realized something by myself, like how the “Sip some water” sound was too rushed. The comments were in general positive, so there wasn’t much to change. The results of both the original sounds and the sounds after the feedback session were satisfactory to me!
Reflection
I am not very used to using sounds in prototypes. To be honest, this was the first time I had to make my own sounds in a project. It was somewhat challenging as I had to figure out first how to record these sounds with proper quality, then how to enhance this sound on a software (I chose Adobe Audition Pro).
I imagined the process to be much more difficult and complicated than what it really was, but in the end I had a lot of fun and learned a lot about non-visual prototyping.
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