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The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

uxdesign.cc

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Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#431

Post by morsch »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #415
temporallobe wrote: post #7

Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.

> If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks. And is an actual potentiometer with stops at min/max volume, not some kind of digital encoder wheel that debounces my input away when I spin it down fast because I want it quiet right now and both my hands somewhere else.

I dunno, I kind of like having a second volume control at the wheel, which isn't easily compatible with having a physical potentiometer. Just make it a digital control that you can spin quickly (also let me push it for instant mute).

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#432

Post by RandallBrown »

matsemann wrote: post #227
RandallBrown wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just reach into my pocket and press the physical buttons on the phone. Works pretty well. I do wish there was a way to do it by touching the headphones though. I held off on buying AirPods for a few years mostly for that reason.

But you still ended up buying them? I didn't know it's not possible, glad I went with Jabra Elite Active instead. Cannot imagine trying to muck around with that crap while out running.

I did end up buying them.

Apple's ear buds are the only ones that fit comfortably in my ears so it's sorta my only choice. (The pros do not, which is unfortunate.)

I don't typically run with headphones in so that's not an issue, but even if I did, it's pretty easy to hit the volume button on my phone unless it's in a backpack or something.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#433

Post by gumby »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #396
gumby wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a better world, albeit one spy-device at a time.

We laugh, but in all seriousness, what evidence is there that Amazon is acting unethically with the Echo devices?

Counterevidence: some of them (perhaps all) have a hardware switch to mute the microphone, a requirement allegedly set by the CEO.

Parallel evidence: the Ring acquisition has aggressively integrated itself with police forces.

Partial evidence: some of the devices are known to retain data even after being reset to factory settings (I presume it's a bug).

It has to be listening all the time for its activation command and we have no idea what it's doing with the data that comes in and is determined not to be the activation command.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#434

Post by culopatin »

azalemeth wrote: post #344
culopatin wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is impossible because it throws meetings with chats all in the same list so you have 3000 things going on. Not to mention that meetings that ended 3 weeks ago still have active chats. Or if you were invited once now you’re forever attached to the chat of all the meetings that come after, even if you’re not invited. Teams started ok, but it has become worse than Skype, which is something I didn’t think was possi…

Ahh, but MSN messenger was not the best of all chat clients in its day either. I remember advertisement aplenty, spam, terrible "candy bar" UIs and a password reset system that basically let others steal your account easily. I think I used the official client maybe twice at an upper limit. Honestly, the best UI Microsoft ever invented were always those inside their video games. I still think AoE2 is hard to beat.

I mean it was pretty cancerous but it was stable and simple to use. A list of your chats sorted by last activity. Towards the end you could even play games. Voice messages, gifs, etc. It was a free ms product from the early 2000s, in 20 years we should’ve gotten much further ahead, instead we went backwards

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#435

Post by Tempest1981 »

RubberbandSoul wrote: post #286
temporallobe wrote: post #7

Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.

My Nissan has a center console that cedes ALL controls to the rear camera app when the car is put in reverse. So if you have music playing you can twist the physical volume knob all you like while in reverse and nothing will happen! If you parallel park daily you'll probably experience this every time: You jump in the car, start it and put it in reverse. The music will start playing after a couple of seconds at the l…

Does the power button work, or is it also locked out?

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#436

Post by nicoburns »

dash2 wrote: post #382
Beldin wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was grading an online exam yesterday. You're lucky. This program used an SPA. The core workflow is hidden and split over multiple "tabs". Tabs include: question, given answer, score awarded. That's right, none of those are available simultaneously. Yes, 70% of its window goes unused when full-screen. Going through all students can be done in (at least) two ways. In the first, you can press a button to proceed to th…

Could this by any chance be Blackboard [1]? [1] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-b...

I don't think Blackboard is an SPA (it's just very slow server rendered), but it's UI really is terrible. I wrote a script to scrape my course materials when I was at uni, it was that bad.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#437

Post by schmorptron »

gumby wrote: post #122
abram wrote: post #102

I find Apple's suggestion to use Siri to control the volume on the AirPods Pro [0] to be worse than some of the ideas on that page. The idea of having a spoken conversation in public in which I must request a volume change via a branded AI (and then repeat that request multiple times if necessary to reach my desired volume) just feels humiliating. [0] "To change the volume, say 'Hey, Siri,' then say something like 'T…

One of the teens in the house has discovered you can say “Hey Alexa shut the fuck up”. I’m afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.

Ha, I've been doing the same thing with google assistant. Try it politely once, and then if it doesn't work or understand change to "shut the fuck up" and it somehow always gets it.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#438

Post by wizzwizz4 »

scott-smith_us wrote: post #319
BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook also has had this problem of emails just not showing up. Sometimes it takes a whole day for an email to arrive. Amazingly low quality for such a wide used product. MS in particular has the habit of actually introducing small bugs like this regularly through their usual updates. It's infuriating. One day something works the next it just doesn't. I know people who never update their machine because of this. Can…

> I know people who never update their machine because of this. HA! I was just testing a VR app that has a Windows component when things started failing in VR. I took off my headset and noticed my test machine going through power-on self test. "Oh crap!", I thought, "a bug caused the system to reboot". Nope. Just Microsoft deciding it's time to apply some updates. Doesn't matter that I scheduled for a time that I wou…

I'm convinced the "schedule" thing doesn't actually do anything. It worked in Windows 8, and that's the last version of Windows where updating was (almost) tolerable.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#439

Post by [deleted] »

Humdeee wrote: post #398
aasasd wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so hilariously misguided, it's like some student's experimental pet project. It gives zero visual hint as to how to use it (i.e. ‘affordances’). From the looks, I'd guess that it's a horizontal slider with the range of like fifty pixels. If this was any kind of an established control, you'd surely just use the speaker icon itself as the ‘handler’ to grab—the fact that they needed the separate green dot says en…

I actually thought the image hadn't loaded correctly when I first opened it. I would have no clue what to do with this the first time seeing it.

[deleted]

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#440

Post by ajklsdhfniuwehf »

feross wrote: post #229
ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote: post #130

Those are still all better than mobile phones that have a dozen "volumes" and when you press the volume up when a video is just starting you might get lucky and lower the media volume, or you might have missed it for one microsecond and now you are stuck on ring or alarm or whatever volume while the video plays.

You can disable changing the ringer volume with the buttons. Then the volume buttons only ever control the media volume for apps, videos, etc. It’s so much nicer. It’s in Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Change with Buttons. I never want to change the ringer volume. I just set it to maximum in Settings and use the physical vibrate switch when I want silence.

depends on: android version. manufacturer customizations. and probably other things.

likely 90% of people will not even have that option.

i see it on android11+ with the samsung UI extras. There's no such option in the other 12 devices i looked at just now.

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