User behaviour: Challenges

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Analyse user needs and behaviour carefully. Gathering feedback from users is actually a research field in itself and shouldn’t be done without carefully designed methods.

Develop tools and technologies that take user needs and behaviour into account. Much work in MIR is technology-driven, rather than being user, context or application driven. Thus the challenge is to step into the shoes of users and understand their world-view in order to produce useful applications. User studies must be considered right from the beginning of a research project. Appropriate tools and technologies must be developed to cater for different types of users who perform the same task in different contexts.

Identify and study new user roles related to music activities. The aforementioned user-types (listener, performer and composer) are prototypes and not orthogonal (guitar-hero involves both listening and performing). Moreover users can have different expertise for the same role (common people, musicologist). Development of MIR tools will also create new user-profiles that need to be identified and taken into account.

Develop tools that automatically adapt to the user. According to the role, profile and context the tools must be personalised. Those profiles are therefore dynamic, multidimensional. Those are also fuzzy given the nature of the input provided by the user. An alternative to the personalisation of tools is the use of a companion (the "music guru").