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PAUL DIGEROLAMO

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Chorus Redesign, Fall 2020-2021

A site unfamiliar to most, yet important to me, is the site that I used to download much of the necessary content to play the game Clone Hero, which is essentially a computer version of Guitar Hero that gives you access to all existing songs from the Guitar Hero games and various community made songs. The site as it stood worked decently to find some individual songs, but I felt that the layout could be improved to allow for easier filtration and analysis of the songs before somebody goes to download a song. You can really only find songs that you know specific details about, like the song name and the artist, or details about the chart of the song, such as the difficulty and the playable instruments.

old chorus layout New chorus layout

To give users a better way of looking for new songs to download, I redesigned the filtration system to be more concise and easier to understand by lining it up with details listed on the song. Once this design is coded and implemented, users will not only be able to search for songs based on chart and song details but through how many likes and downloads are on a specific chart. If the user comes across a song they may wish to download, instead of downloading it into the game to check, they could click on the album cover to the left hand side to play a preview of the song. As it stands, many Clone Hero players will download large packs instead of individual songs so they could listen to the previews in game. Those would also be available on the home page in the new setlist carousel, as they are popular among players, but for those that are not looking to use up large amounts of space on their computer for songs they will not end up playing, this system of song searching will be much more effective for handpicking the songs that players want, rather than just guessing at which packs to download.

category sort test results for content organization

The design process was interesting to follow through for the first time, as my site choice was rather obscure and the user base was very specific. Quite literally, only people that have Clone Hero will have anything to get out of this site, and since I play the game avidly, I had a decent understanding of the user base. Just to be sure though, I was instructed to develop a user persona and do a card sort test to see how users organized the content on their site. Most people organized the content by official Guitar Hero content and community content, but a decent portion split up the large setlist and the individual charts, so I added different tabs for the both of them. The prototype does not include all the pages of what the finished site would have, only the home and chart page, but within this version, the carousel can move back and forth and the dropdown filter on the chart page is functional.