Hi, my name is Alon Oz
I am a graphic designer and a 3D modeler
and this is my portfolio.
Alon Oz
Imagine
Music processing software
For children with special needs
Overview
VOGO Volunteering
As part of my desire to gain experience, I joined the group as a member of the VOGO community. Together, we helped improve the application for developing and donating music to children with special needs.
Abut Imagine
In Israel and around the world, Imagine is a leader in inclusive musical education, offering a variety of pedagogical products aimed at developing musical abilities and life skills. We have developed and tested hundreds of products.
The goal
As part of its efforts to serve the special needs population, the association has software that processes music and creates sheet music specially adapted for them.
As originally created, the software wasn't able to meet all of the needs of instructors in the association.
The goal was to improve the existing software so that the music pages could be created in a convenient, good way, and adapted to the users' needs.
My role
My role in the team was to create UX/UI for the components we saw as needing to be changed
Challenges
Using shapes and colors instead of notes, a special musical language was invented in Norway to give children the chance to play and understand music easily.
To present music in this language, you need software that can create appropriate color pages.
Additionally, the creator must be able to hear what he is creating
and output coloring pages in the new language.
It is very important to present the shapes and colors precisely in order to adapt them to children with different needs, Additionally, it is important to allow the software to adjust the print size for each child so that adjustments can be made easily.
Initially, the director and the software designer worked together to create software, but due to a lack of time, the software was difficult to use and many changes were necessary, which is where our team stepped in.
The solution
A number of features were developed to enhance the software
and to meet the needs of the customers.
-
Setting exact shapes and colors in the software, as well as resizing options for accurate printing
-
Making keyboard shortcuts to make work more convenient and faster
-
Design a keyboard that can be used to play on the screen and communicate in the adapted language.
Feature 1
Setting exact shapes and colors in the software, as well as resizing options for accurate printing.
This population has special needs, so the shapes and colors have been selected carefully, and their accuracy is crucial. In addition, individual adjustments must be made for each child.
Therefore, we created a character sheet that allows for a wide range of sizes and number of lines, and everything can be edited so that the same piece can be produced in several versions for different numbers of children
Feature 2
Making keyboard shortcuts to make work more convenient and faster.
During its first version, the software could only be used with the mouse, creating a lot of confusion and slowing down work.
After we started working with the customers,
we realized that this was something we had to develop in order to make a significant improvement.
A standard keyboard cannot accommodate such a large number of keys in one row, so playing 7 notes and 5 octaves was the first challenge. We created a line of notes for this purpose and separated the octaves so that you can move between them easily using ][.
Following this, we need to create buttons for continuity. After a little research, we found there is one continuity that is used more than others, so we created specific buttons for the 4 main sizes and added the option +- to work for other sizes.
As a final step, we added the editing buttons that are found in every editing program that we all know.
Feature 3
Design a keyboard that can be used to play on the screen and communicate in the adapted language
It was decided that there is a need to improve the keyboard that appears on the screen.
The role of the keyboard is also to facilitate playing on the screen and to provide indication of what the user is playing when using the computer keyboard.
Shapes and colors symbols appear on the keyboard in order to emphasize the role of each one, keyboard shortcuts appear on active shapes, a bottom slider allows movement between octaves, and markings of the selected octave and buttons for selecting continuations appear above.