Breaking the workflow: Design heuristics to support the development of usable digital audio production tools: framing usability heuristics for contemporary purposes

The investigation that follows presents the results of a series of workshops with professional musicians and music producers. The work here elicits requirements for musicians in terms of software systems. The scope here explores how to design systems to support creativity and collaboration while maintaining a usable system - one which is effective, efficient and satisfies the user. The format models that of similar workshops, where a three-pronged approach is taken to focus on three different types of creativity: exploratory, combinatorial and transformational approaches. Participants describe a story that defines different user roles and expectations. Focus groups help to refine and combine the existing experiences and begin identify ways in which systems can be made more usable, and support more creative ways of working. We consider the broader consideration of usability, including defining and describing different user types and how their views of usability may differ or even be at odds. Our findings show that while existing systems are very good at supporting traditional usability metrics, they may not consider the broader implications of a considered and holistic user experience

Performance in a Dual Distribution Irish Building Society: The Role of Human Resource Management and Leadership

This thesis explores the subject of organisational performance in a partially franchised organisation, the EBS Building Society, a retail financial service business. It focuses on understanding why, in a dual distribution system, a franchised outlet outperforms a non-franchised outlet within the same organisation. In particular it examines the potential impact of Human Resource Management (HRM) and leadership practices at both the level of the individual and of the unit. Many studies have examined the link between HR practices and performance, however, few have studied the system of practices within a retail financial services network. This thesis is concerned with the behaviours of the managers of franchised units of the EBS Building Society and how those behaviours may potentially explain why managers outperform their colleagues in the company manned branch network from a financial perspective. Specifically, the study will highlight the current performance measures that are pertinent to both franchised and non-franchised outlets and it will set out to connect these measures to the HRM practices and leadership styles of managers in EBS units. In particular, the study explores the nature of the linkages between HRM/leadership practices and behaviours, focusing in particular on three possibilities: Empowerment, Perceived Organisational Support (POS) and Work Intensification to understanding how HRM or leadership impacts on performance in organisations. The Study found that, as anticipated, HRM had a positive indirect effect on employee service interaction behaviour with empowerment having the greatest consequence. There was also evidence that agency status within the EBS contributes to service quality, in part through the development of higher levels of unit-level employee service behaviours and unit level leadership. The importance of the research lies in the fact that it offers, for the first time, some evidence on the impact of HRM and leadership practices within a hybrid franchised financial firm in Ireland. It also offers for the first time a comparison of the three different possibilities or mediators and their explanatory powers on HRM and leadership and their effects on organisation performance by adopting a multi-level approach

Beyond Slow: The Problem of Realism in Contemporary Minimalist Cinema

This thesis examines how a series of contemporary narrative filmmakers use minimalism paradoxically to enhance, detract from and interrogate the realism of their films, in order to critique current cinematic practices and investigate new approaches to the centuries-old dilemma of how reality can be represented on screen. This thesis is a creative doctoral project, comprising of an exegesis and a feature-length documentary/fiction film, This Used To Be Here

One-sample aggregate data meta-analysis of medians

An aggregate data meta-analysis is a statistical method that pools the summary statistics of several selected studies to estimate the outcome of interest. When considering a continuous outcome, typically each study must report the same measure of the outcome variable and its spread (e.g., the sample mean and its standard error). However, some studies may instead report the median along with various measures of spread. Recently, the task of incorporating medians in meta-analysis has been achieved by estimating the sample mean and its standard error from each study that reports a median in order to meta-analyze the means. In this paper, we propose two alternative approaches to meta-analyze data that instead rely on medians. We systematically compare these approaches via simulation study to each other and to methods that transform the study-specific medians and spread into sample means and their standard errors. We demonstrate that the proposed median-based approaches perform better than the transformation-based approaches, especially when applied to skewed data and data with high inter-study variance. In addition, when meta-analyzing data that consists of medians, we show that the median-based approaches perform considerably better than or comparably to the best-case scenario for a transformation approach: conducting a meta-analysis using the actual sample mean and standard error of the mean of each study. Finally, we illustrate these approaches in a meta-analysis of patient delay in tuberculosis diagnosis

Understanding social media and sound: music, meaning and membership, the case of SoundCloud

Social media technologies have meant that people’s mu- sic consumption and production practices have rapidly changed and evolved. In this paper, we start to explore and present some of our initial findings in respect to this growing area of research by focusing upon the audio distribution platform SoundCloud. Technologies such as SoundCloud are enabling music producers and consumers a whole range of different ways in which they can engage, give/get feedback, promote, share, acquire, tag and make meaning of music. In this respect we are able to observe the role that such systems play in respect to: workflows and metadata production. The work also speaks about music consumption and production; as an individual and part of the crowd. We envisage that this paper will both provide a platform for future research and offer some insights into this world

Understanding social media and sound: music, meaning and membership, the case of SoundCloud

Social media technologies have meant that people’s mu- sic consumption and production practices have rapidly changed and evolved. In this paper, we start to explore and present some of our initial findings in respect to this growing area of research by focusing upon the audio distribution platform SoundCloud. Technologies such as SoundCloud are enabling music producers and consumers a whole range of different ways in which they can engage, give/get feedback, promote, share, acquire, tag and make meaning of music. In this respect we are able to observe the role that such systems play in respect to: workflows and metadata production. The work also speaks about music consumption and production; as an individual and part of the crowd. We envisage that this paper will both provide a platform for future research and offer some insights into this world

Designing and Developing User-Centred Systems

Our work explores the implications for the design, development and deployment of interactive music production tools through the lens of user experience design. We offer a toolkit for those interested in building human-centred software within the audio production and performance space. The work is enabled through identification of key concerns and challenges for designing software that is both usable and useful - through the exploration of in the wild engagements. We explore the rich context of music making in-situ, highlighting the roles, features and complexities of making music in a modular, disparate and often non-linear way. The work identifies three key roles within the space and discuss the interplay between said roles. The work relates these roles to key agendas within the music production process, discussing how agendas and tools to support said agendas must change over time, supporting not only stereotypical production practice but fringe cases on the periphery of what we consider to be traditional practice. The culmination of the work proposes an updated set of heuristics, loosely based on those proposed by Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman. The proposed design implications relate specifically to music making activities and offer a framework to produce more usable, accessible and aesthetically pleasant digital technologies in supporting production and performance

The UX of Music Making

Our case presents an artist using a car as an instrument. Contemporary technology enables artists to take everyday objects and create original compositions. Through the use of mobile smartphones, laptops and audio recording technologies the recording studio becomes a much more broadly defined space. We explore implications of audio capture and composition in an efficient manner, through taking simple everyday sounds and processing them to explore the range of creative possibilities. In this space, the environment becomes a canvas for discovery, composition and creative exploration, with limitless potential. We describe some of the working processes of musicians involved in this practice, the challenges, roles and emergent metadata therein

Estimating the sample mean and standard deviation from commonly reported quantiles in meta-analysis

Researchers increasingly use meta-analysis to synthesize the results of several studies in order to estimate a common effect. When the outcome variable is continuous, standard meta-analytic approaches assume that the primary studies report the sample mean and standard deviation of the outcome. However, when the outcome is skewed, authors sometimes summarize the data by reporting the sample median and one or both of (i) the minimum and maximum values and (ii) the first and third quartiles, but do not report the mean or standard deviation. To include these studies in meta-analysis, several methods have been developed to estimate the sample mean and standard deviation from the reported summary data. A major limitation of these widely used methods is that they assume that the outcome distribution is normal, which is unlikely to be tenable for studies reporting medians. We propose two novel approaches to estimate the sample mean and standard deviation when data are suspected to be non-normal. Our simulation results and empirical assessments show that the proposed methods often perform better than the existing methods when applied to non-normal data

Revisiting the g-null paradox

The parametric g-formula is an approach to estimating causal effects of sustained treatment strategies from observational data. An often cited limitation of the parametric g-formula is the g-null paradox: a phenomenon in which model misspecification in the parametric g-formula is guaranteed under the conditions that motivate its use (i.e., when identifiability conditions hold and measured time-varying confounders are affected by past treatment). Many users of the parametric g-formula know they must acknowledge the g-null paradox as a limitation when reporting results but still require clarity on its meaning and implications. Here we revisit the g-null paradox to clarify its role in causal inference studies. In doing so, we present analytic examples and a simulation-based illustration of the bias of parametric g-formula estimates under the conditions associated with this paradox. Our results highlight the importance of avoiding overly parsimonious models for the components of the g-formula when using this method