Despite the many technological advancements made in the music industry in recent years, there is still not a single widely adopted platform for musicians to play music together online. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent quarantine pushed the need for such a platform into the spotlight. As a response, the music company Elk Audio launched their new product: Aloha. Aloha is a combined hardware and web application that allows musicians to play music in real-time over the Internet. Aloha is currently only intended for musicians who already know each other to connect and play. However, Elk's ambition is to make it the go-to platform for musicians to expand their network.  The purpose of this Master's Thesis is to design the next version of the web application of Aloha, focusing on social interactions. This Master's Thesis investigates musicians' current social and musical behaviour, and their opinions of how this can be done online. Qualitative data was collected by performing semi-structured interviews with musicians of different backgrounds. The study revealed many different goals and needs of potential users of Aloha. Furthermore, we found several determining factors which enable and encourage musicians to form new musical relationships online. The final suggested design is based on the analysed data and founded in theory regarding persuasive and recommending system design, among others. / Trots de tekniska framstegen som gjorts inom musikindustrin de senaste åren, finns det fortfarande inte ett enda allmänt accepterat alternativ för musiker att spela musik tillsammans online. Covid-19 pandemin och den åtföljande karantänten förde behovet för en sådan plattform till rampljuset. I början av år 2020 insåg musikföretaget Elk Audio att de kunde fylla denna lucka med sin nya produkt: Aloha. Aloha är en kombinerad hårdvara och webbapplikation som möjliggör musiker att spela musik i realtid över Internet. Aloha är för närvarande endast avsedd för musiker som redan känner varandra. Elks ambition är dock att göra Aloha till en plattform för musiker där de kan utöka sitt musikaliska nätverk. Syftet med detta examensarbete är att utforma nästa version av Alohas webbapplikation, med fokus på sociala interaktioner. Detta examensarbete undersöker musikers nuvarande sociala och musikaliska beteenden och deras åsikter om musikaliska interaktioner online. Kvalitativa data samlades in genom att utföra halvstrukturerade intervjuer med musiker från olika bakgrunder. Studien avslöjade de många olika målen och behoven hos potentiella användare av Aloha. Dessutom fann vi flera avgörande faktorer som möjliggör och uppmuntrar musiker att skapa och underhålla nya musikrelationer online. Den slutliga föreslagna designen baseras på det analyserade datat och grundas i teori om design av rekommendationssystem, m. fl..

Recent advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) are placing its own vision, as a platform of interconnected services and devices, at the heart of the smart home concept. This consolidation promises a new wave of innovative products designed in the open, and in which the user takes center stage starting from the very first steps. Therefore, researchers as well as product designers in these increasingly related fields are now tasked with a more complex mission when investigating user behavior. In this thesis we consider rapid prototyping as the upcoming standard process for investigating user interactions in the future smart home. Although past research contributed with several self-contained solutions (built from scratch) to allow such investigations, no accounts were found tackling the problem from our perspective, in which the focus is on how to enable rapid prototyping in an existing proprietary smart home platform by using open standards, software and hardware. To answer this question, we conducted our research with participation of academic researchers and professional designers in the context of an academic and industrial partnership, in an ongoing smart home research project. We used an approach based on the design science research process in combination with the user centered design (UCD) and agile software development methodologies. During this thesis we performed an end to end design process starting from ideation to implementation and evaluation; an architectural blueprint was proposed and a working prototype of our visual smart home rapid prototyping environment (SHRPE) was implemented and tested. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of enabling visual rapid prototyping capabilities in an existing smart home platform, by using the system integration process to introduce available open standards, software and hardware tools into the platform. In addition, evaluation results of user testing confirmed that using UCD to iteratively capture user needs in such complex context is a solid approach.