This is a presentation I gave to the Music Curators explaining the Global Conductor project, its design process, and work completed to date.

1. Global Conductor
for Brand Programming

2. Global Conductor
Q: What is Global Conductor anyway?
The replacement for Conductor
Device Provisioning
Device Management
Brand Programming
Licensing
Content Delivery

3. Schedule
Q: When will we see things? When will we get to use it?
Already started
Device Provisioning and Device Management are in
use
Working out issues and extending functionality
Focuses on new players, better view of existing
Brand Programming is next
Design phase is underway

4. Design Process
Q: How do you design something like Global Conductor?
User-Centered Design
Talking to and listening to users
Learn tasks from talking to and watching Music
Supervisors – building on work by Moses and Jim
Distinguish between how you do your work because of
Conductor vs. how you want to do your work
Find the common and most repeated tasks, determine
best practices for doing them, then design for that

5. Tasks
Concentrating on these areas:
Finding music
Finding a specific song vs. hunting and gathering
Finding music for one brand, and finding music for another
Grouping music
Collections shared across brands vs. branded collections
Collections shared across supervisors
Programing, scheduling music
Messaging

6. Designing
Brand Programming
Step 1: Build a logical model of tasks and data
What are the pieces? How do they fit together?
Is it easily explainable?
Do similar pieces work the same way in different areas?

7. Model
Music
Collections of Music
Channels
Brands
Devices

8. Visualizing the Model
Step 2: Draw mockups by hand
 Get lots of paper, large whiteboards
 Draw screens that support the tasks and best practices
 Step through each task one by one

9. Hand-Drawn Mockups

10. Design Getting Sticky
Step 3: Draw wireframes in software (Balsamiq)
Changes getting smaller
Able to show different people the same thing

11. Mockup in Balsamiq

12. Test and Verify the Design
Step 4: Review with users, stakeholders, dev
Step 5: Usability test the wireframes with users
Step 6: Give brave users working code, adjust as needed

13. Planning
Q: How will it be decided what to build first, next, last?
What needs to be built first?
What adds most value to users for the effort?
Can we can we deliver pieces instead of waiting to
finish the whole thing?
Add new functionality rather than replacing

14. Some Details
Q: Will it be a desktop application, like Conductor, or a web-app in a browser?
Web-app, accessible from anywhere
Role-based, using permissions, to enable users to see the parts they use
Can also be a portal for customers, like Serenade
Q: What size screen will it work on?
Designed to fit on laptop monitors.
Will work better on larger displays.
Likely to work on mobile, but only some tasks, like listening to or removing songs.

15. Q & A