Visual Analyses of Music History: A User-Centric Approach

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.