Visual Analyses of Music History: A User-Centric Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a user-centric approach to visualizing individual music listening histories and recommendations, aiming to enhance user engagement and experience in online music services.

Contribution

It introduces new visualization schemes for music history analysis and validates their effectiveness through user studies, providing insights for future visualization design.

Findings

Proposed visualizations are effective in engaging users.

User feedback confirms the utility of the visualization schemes.

Insights gained can guide future visualization design in music services.

Abstract

Music history, referring to the records of users' listening or downloading history in online music services, is the primary source for music service providers to analyze users' preferences on music and thus to provide personalized recommendations to users. In order to engage users into the service and to improve user experience, it would be beneficial to provide visual analyses of one user's music history as well as visualized recommendations to that user. In this paper, we take a user-centric approach to the design of such visual analyses. We start by investigating user needs on such visual analyses and recommendations, then propose several different visualization schemes, and perform a pilot study to collect user feedback on the designed schemes. We further conduct user studies to verify the utility of the proposed schemes, and the results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed visualization, but also provide important insights to guide the visualization design in the future.