2014:GC14UX

Welcome to GC14UX

Grand Challenge on User Experience 2014

Purposes

Holistic evaluation of user experience in interacting with user-serving MIR systems

Goals

1) to inspire the development of complete MIR systems 2) to promote the notion of user experience as a first-class research objective in the MIR community

Dataset

A set of music audio of 10,000 tracks is provided for the GC14UX. It will be a subset of tracks drawn from Jamendo collection's CC-BY licensed works (http://www.jamendo.com/en/welcome).

The Jamendo collection contains music in a variety of genres and moods, but is mostly unknown to most listeners. This will mitigate against the possible user experience bias induced by the differential presence (or absence) of popular or known music within the participating systems.

As of May 20, 2014, the Jamendo collection contains 14742 tracks with the CC-BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). The CC-BY license allows others to distribute, modify, optimize and use your work as a basis, even commercially, as long as you give credit for the original creation. This is one of the most permissive licenses possible.

The 10,000 tracks in GC14UX will be sampled (w.r.t. maximizing music variety) from the Jamendo collection with CC-BY license and made available for participants (system developers) to download to build their systems.

Participating Systems

Unlike conventional MIREX tasks, participants are not asked to submit their systems. Instead, the systems will be hosted by their developers. All participating systems need to be constructed as websites accessible to users through normal web browsers. Participating teams will submit the URLs to their systems to the GC14UX team.

Potential Participants

(Cool) Team Name	Name(s)	Email(s)
The MIR UX Master	Dr. MIR	mir@domain.com

Evaluation

Task

To ensure that the GC14UX does not become a system-centered evaluation in disguise, the process will remain as agnostic as possible concerning the technological means by which participating systems create and deliver their experiences to the users. The only requirement for the systems is they should support music discovery (in whichever ways).

Evaluators will be recruited from the MIR community. After all the participating systems are ready, evaluators will be given the following task:

You are creating a short video about a memorable occasion that happened to you recently, and you need to find some songs to use as background music.

Criteria:

• Overall satisfaction: Rate your overall satisfaction with this system. (0-20: very unsatisfied; 20-40: somewhat unsatisfied; 40-60: neutral; 60-80: somewhat satisfied; 80-100: very satisfied).

• Learnability: How easy was it to figure out how to use the system?

• Interaction: Does the system “warn” you when you’re about to make a mistake? Are you able to backtrack when you want to? Are you able to recover from unexpected operations? Are you able to efficiently complete your task?

• Presentation: How well does the system communicate what’s going on? How well do you feel the system informs you of its status? Can you clearly understand the labels and words used in the system? How visible are all of your options and menus when you use this system? Is the design aesthetically pleasing?

An open-ended question is provided but is optional for users to give feedback if they wish to do so.

Evaluation mechanism

The GC14UX team will provide a set of evaluation forms which wrap around the participating system. In other words, the evaluation system will offer forms for scoring the participating system, and embed the system within an iframe.

To prompt a scenario/context in which a user interacts with participating systems, a half-defined sentence will be provided to a user in the evaluation webforms *before* a set of participating systems are shown to the user:

“I am looking for music for ______________”

The user is free to fill in any need s/he would like to find music for, such as “drinking a cup of coffee”, or “waiting for my girlfriend”. In this way, the goal of the user is captured and the goal is as authentic to the user as possible.

Evaluators

They will be users aged 18 and above. For this round, evaluators will be drawn primarily from the MIR community through solicitations via the ISMIR-community mailing list. It is planned that each submitted system will be evaluated by 50 to 60 evaluators. The evaluation webforms developed by the GC14UX team will ensure all participating systems will get equal number of evaluators.

Evaluation results

Statistics of the scores given by all evaluators will be reported: mean, average deviation. Meaningful text comments from the evaluators will also be reported.

Certificates

The GC14UX will present certificates to all participating systems and the system(s) with the highest mean score.

Wireframes

Important Dates

• July 1: announce the GC
• Sep. 21st: deadline for system submission
• Sep. 28th: start the evaluation
• Oct. 20th: close the evaluation system
• Oct. 27th: announce the results
• Oct. 31st: MIREX and GC session in ISMIR2014