ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Chris K <oneleggedracer@xxxxxxx>]

Hi.

I am just a fan that has a N4 running UT on it.  I play with it here and there to see how things are progressing.
On the whole, I'm liking the OS.  There are a few things that prevent me from being able to really dogfood if for you all (e.g. no data because there is no way to put in an APN.  If you can put in the ability to edit APN's, then I can do more for you.)

This email is pretty long and I hope that it serves as some sort of constructive feedback for the Music App.  The music app is pretty bad for usability.  I say this as an Information Architect with over 10 years dedicated experience.  I often need to put myself into the mind of a beginning user to think about how a newbie would interact with an application.  In the case of the music app, even I as a "power user" cannot really figure it out.  

I don't want to just complain without at least offering to help out.  I know that you have a lot of UI specialists at Cannonical so I don't want to spend my time thinking through solutions if it is stepping on other peoples toes.

There are a few things I would like to point out:  

- OS level  interactions should not break or be removed on an application.  Bottom Up Slide has always triggered the back button.  This cannot change because of a playbar.  I need my back button to be always in the same place.

- Recent doesn't seem to populate often.  When I am exploring this app, I need it to do exactly what I expect, and when I see that Recent is blank, even after I have listened to 10 songs already, that's not good.  I lose faith and trust.  Trust is the most important thing.

- On the OS level, Home > Applications > Music....
   Showing a few songs in there using big icons isnt very productive.  I think a list would be much better in this case, or not showing them at all.  perhaps show something much higher up such as "Albums, Artists, Recent", etc.  Eventually, people will have hundreds or thousands of songs on their device.  I see no reason to select 6 at random (or whatever the logic is)

- After clicking on a song title from the launcher
  Why take me to a screen that shows the song again?  Why not just play it?  What are people expecting?
  Why show me what seems to be two ways to play it?  Big play button, and then what seems to be a smaller play button below it in the text 

- Reliability - I just played a video and now I cannot get any music to play.  Must be a bug?  I am rebooting now as I type this.

- Music landing page (from the icon in launcher).  Why start with recent + genres.  Again, after reboot, there is only one there.  Do people want to click on Genres as their main thing?  I'd research this via user labs.  I know I don't but I won't speak for the general population based on a personal preference

- Horizontal slide navigation.  It's not terribly obvious to slide horizontally to see more genres.  A noob wouldnt obviously know to slide horizontally.  Even then, two at a time is a big limiting factor to this nav system.  How can I navigate hundreds of items two at a time?

- Artists. You will need a better system here. List items are too tall.  It will take forever to scroll.  Also, you need an alphabet style link way of getting downt he list fast.  

- Clicking on an artist.  I see <author> <# of albums> <# of songs>.  I click on it, and get basically the same information on the next screen.  This needs to change more.  Show me details here, not the same basic information.    Why do I need to click again to get basic details?

- Clicking on the song down arrow.  I'd swear that I clicked on the down arrow, and not the song name.  instead of giving me more info, it played the song.

- When the song is playing.  You guys stole my back button.  I have no idea what to do to go back.  This song is playing unexpectedly, and I don't know what to do .

- Sliding to clear a playing song.  What does this do?  Why would I "clear" this song?  

- Break: I have a big white bar on the top of my screen.  I am sure it's a bug, but I don't know how to clear it.

- Clicking on image.  This pauses the song and triggers the bottom area to expand.  That's not great either.  Yes it exposes new controls, but why aren't those controls always visible?  Show me another player that doesnt have stop/start always visible.  And "next".

- On player, clickng the down arrow on a song.  Why does this expose an "Add to playlist" action?  It's next in line as it is, won't it just play next?


I'm going to stop the feedback here because I don't want this to sound like a giant complaint-fest. UT does a lot of things well, and sorry to the person/people that designed the music app for such a lot of negative feedback.  It is honestly going to be tough to drop complicated applications into an OS that uses all 4 sides of the screen already.  you are limited to the number of secondary actions you can put inside the bottom bar.  <BACK> must be one of them though.  I am sure this will be a recurring problem for more complicated apps.  I guess in short, I think we are starting to see some of the limitations of this type of UI and how it scales to really complex situations.  When you design, you must always ask the question "What is the worst case scenario for the number of items".  Future needs will lend itself to thousands and thousands of songs, hundreds of genres, hundreds of authors.  It will be tough to scale this model.

If you want me to brainstorm with your IA's, or work on this further, i'd be willing to.  If not, I leave it to your professionals to re-work this application in time.

PS:  please put APN control into the OS so I can actually dogfood this device more.  If there is a tutorial on how to do this, please point me the way to it.

Chris