Re: swap right/play for single item?

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.

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.

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.

Does anyone else have any experience with usability testing?  I'll 
try to take a few naive user through the paces on my SliMP3 but any 
other input would be much appreciated.

-dean



>Dean,
>
>Do you think we should swap the functions of the "right" and "play"
>buttons when an mp3 file is selected?  It's confusing for people who are
>used to the old interface.
>
>Sean
>
>
>
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