How inconsistent design will save iTunes
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How inconsistent design will save iTunes
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Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#2Apart from the fact that I believe this is a horrible, horrible idea (MS Office used to this to me with the menu items, worst idea ever) I believe there are more pressing matters to attend to when it comes to iTunes.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#3As far as I can tell Apple doesn't really care how people use iTunes to play and organize their media; it's, at best, secondary functionality at this point. I'm sure there are developers at Apple working on this aspect of iTunes but I think the primary focus for iTunes from here on in will be as a gateway into the iTunes store and device syncing.
Which is a shame, really, because there aren't a whole lot of alternatives out there for OS X.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#4It's an interesting idea, but this could optimize the wrong thing. You already rely on function x heavily, so why should this function be featured more prominently? You obviously have no trouble finding it. Only because someone doesn't click on a button for some time doesn't mean he won't in the future.
Why not suggest a playlist with songs you listen to the most instead of making the searchbox bigger? Why not suggest songs to listen to next instead of hiding the genius bar?
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#5If anything I use frequently decided to implement this I don't think I would mind, so long as there was some key combination or option somewhere that would temporarily revert the UI back to it's initial state. Think that would be a must if I wanted to do something like follow a tutorial or explain to a friend how to do something over the phone. I don't know if it would be the best option for people who like everything to behave the same all the time though. And messing with peoples spatial understanding of menus and things can often annoy them. Maybe the process should be opt-in?
The idea of the growing search box is interesting, but what about one that kind of decays? It begins to shrink without usage until it reaches some point and then disappears. A good metaphor would be muscles, use them and they grow, don't lose them and they atrophy. I think non-IT oriented folk should be able to work out whats going on with enough visual cues. Especially if it becomes a common enough concept in software.
Edit: clarified a few things
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#6If someone's already using certain things frequently, they clearly know how to get to them; I'd personally be very irritated if the UI started changing to "fit my needs", which are already taken care of by the UI. Culling features out, however, is not a bad idea, but one has to wonder why you wouldn't focus on making the features easier to use and more useful, rather than dynamically culling them away.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#7Horrible, horrible idea. Imagine your car did the same. "Ooh, winter's back, need the rear window demister ... hey, where's the damn button gone?".
This is like those dancing menus Office used to have, except even worse, because it lowers the discoverability of advanced functions just as you're getting to the stage where you'd be more likely to use them.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#8This would work, if it didn't make things more difficult for less common tasks (many Linux distro's suffer this same problem, everything is great and productive when you are performing mainstream computing. However, cross the boundary slightly, and you'll find yourself in bash shell, which ruins all productivity benefits).
Sorry, but this isn't a good idea. iTunes actually wouldn't be half bad if they permitted addons, theming and official support for MTP/MSC. However, inconsistant UI's are a big no-no according to the lecturer who taught me GUI design, because users have to continue learning and cannot rely on elements existing where they expect them.
Just my 2cents though.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#9Just 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 that it caused more confusion than it solved: people remembered seeing a command somewhere, but couldn't relocate it because it had been hidden.
Perhaps Microsoft's implementation could have been smarter, but I believe that they successfully demonstrated that this approach does not have merit.
Re: How inconsistent design will save iTunes
#10iTunes may ask me if I want to re-arrange the controls but not remove it without my permission.