Re: swap right/play for single item?

On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 08:42:22PM -0700, dean blackketter wrote:
> Well, I think that now is a better time to make the UI right, before 
> you have a lot more users.    The question then is, what is right?
> 
> I think that the average new user's expectation was that the play 
> button would be used to play whatever is displayed on the screen.  I 
> think we're doing that now.
> 
> We've established the convention that up and down scroll though items 
> in a list, and right moves down into that item and left moves up a 
> level in the hierarchy.  This seems intuitive to me, an experienced 
> computer user.  I'd love to put my parents in front of the SliMP3 and 
> see how they navigate through the list, but my intuition tells me 
> that this convention is as good as any.  (The stereo in my car uses 
> the down arrow to skip back to the previous song.  Pressing down 
> means making the number go down right?  Arg. :-)
> 
> So, what does it mean to hit the right arrow when you have a song 
> displayed on the screen?  My initial expectation was that it wouldn't 
> do anything, because navigating and playing are separate functions. 
> (I wouldn't expect it to start playing just because I was navigating 
> around.)
> 
> Alternatively, if you navigate into a song, maybe you display info 
> about the song (it's length, full title, artist, album, etc...). 
> That's what I was thinking it should probably be down the road.



That's what I'm thinking.  Toggle between ID3 info and, say, time
remaining, bitrate, etc.  The types of things people like to have
displayed using LCD plugins for WinAmp and similar.



> 
> The second issue is: when you tell it to play a song, should it then 
> just stop?  Or should it continue on?  I think that the current 
> solution is probably counter-intuitive, that if you chose an 
> individual song to play then you should just play that song and not 
> all the other songs "around" it.  If you want to play the whole 
> album, then press left to display the album and then press play to 
> play the album.

Should we just have an explicit "play once/repeat forever" toggle
for this?  Seems to be standard with most other MP3 players.

> 
> So, my answer, I guess is:  Unless we see that new users (and there 
> will be lots of them, right?) find the current solution confusing, we 
> should try to re-train the few, smart and brave existing users to use 
> what's best for the majority in the long run.

Having worked with helping a new user understand the interface, I
can offer one anecdotal data point:  using "right == play" is
confusing.


(P.S. - sorry I haven't devoted any time to coding this past week.
I've been occupied with other, work-related matters, as well as
needing to rebuild the hardware of one of my home systems)

-- 
Mark C. Langston
[email protected]
Systems & Network Admin
http://www.bitshift.org

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