CueBert

Cuebert is a prototype audio mixing console designed for the musical theatre. Following a user-centered design process, the goal was to reconceptualize the traditional mixing console using modern technology and interaction techniques, questioning over fifty years of interface design in audio technology. The final design retains the physical controls - faders and knobs - demanded by sound mixing engineers while taking advantage of multitouch display technology to allow for flexible display of dynamic and context-sensitive content.

Design Process

Working on a four-person team speacializing in Human-Computer Interaction, we followed the user-centered design process to create the console: we interviewed several musical theatre sound mixing professionals through a contextual inquiry process, integrated our findings using affinity diagramming, developed personas, use cases and scenarios, conceptualized the interface, created lo-fi paper prototype, a hi-fi projection-based prototype and finally performed user testing.

Our research paper on the development of CueBert was accepted to the 2010 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME).

Contextual inquiry, affinity diagramming, lo-fi prototyping, hi-fi prototyping, informal user testing

Photoshop, Tascam M-3500

We produced two videos of our hi-fi prototype, Cue-bert. The first gives an overall view of the features and functionality. The second walks through our hi-fi scenario.

Download our poster in PDF format (6.6 MB):