How inconsistent design will save iTunes • Hacker News Board

Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes

#21

Post by MWinther » Thu, May 06, 2010, 4:41 PM UTC

robgough wrote: post #20

Of all my problems and concerns about iTunes. Not for a single moment have I ever thought "I wish that search box was a bit bigger" or "that darn cover flow icon is wasting too much space, I wish there was more blank grey space here". Performance increases will save iTunes. Not this horrendous "smart UI" idea. I hate being so harsh in a comment, and feel mean for writing it. But iTunes is one of the worst programs I…

When it comes to playing music and sync I still feel it works as expected, even though I wouldn't mind a speedier experience. Of course, I have been using it since version 3 sometime, so I'm used to it by now.

Where iTunes really feels inconsistent or non-intuitive for me is the video section, where playback definitely doesn't feel Apple-y (Why does it blank my primary screen when I do fullscreen video on my secondary, for instance?) I would much rather have the option to open video in Quicktime Player rather than having the sub-par experience within iTunes itself.

Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes

#22

Post by MWinther » Thu, May 06, 2010, 4:45 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #9

Just what I want starts out giving the user everything, but after a couple of weeks of training, the UI adapts to how the user interacts with it. ... "Didn’t I have a search field before?" The short answer is: yes. But who cares if you don’t use it anyway? Microsoft Office used to have a UI that would do this. It was always the very first setting I'd change, disabling the feature. And Microsoft eventually discovered…

I remember rummaging through the menus to find the menu item where one could do that to... To make matters worse, they had one "Options..." and one "Settings..." in the same menu, and I never remembered which one had those settings in it, so I pretty much always had to go through two dialog boxes before having the menus working properly again. Oh, the humanity!

Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes

#23

Post by codejoust » Thu, May 06, 2010, 9:58 PM UTC

Even autohide taskbars are annoying, I'm using a 10px gnome panel now, and more command-line text search (built into nautilus). A problem with this approach is also if I go over to a friend's house that doesn't ever use the search box, I'll have to jump through hoops to even get to the search box, not a good idea. Hiding user interfaces and dynamically adopting them could be a good idea, but it makes the user think more, in an attempt to make them think less. When helping others, uniformity is important.

If this site was like this, realizing that I read the whole comment thread before commenting and moving the comment box to the bottom of the page for me, it would be frustrating because I would sometimes scroll up and think I was logged out, etc. (Big problem even when people accidentally remove UI elements from a program such as safari by dragging them off the toolbar.)

Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes

#24

Post by kennu » Sat, May 08, 2010, 12:48 PM UTC

I don't think the real problem is with the idea of auto-adaptiveness but with the implementations and their faulty assumptions.

E.g. I have one computer that I bring out maybe once a month at parties. It should not think: "Okay, he hasn't used these playlists for a month, we can hide them." Some computers are also shared between many users (using the same account), so the adaptation logic would have to somehow realize that. And so on.

I think Apple is wise in not trying to do something like this until it can be done right. When it's done right, the user will never even realize it. Everything will just seem even smoother and simpler than before.