

How inconsistent design will save iTunes - tonyhanna
http://www.teedot.com/blog/2010/05/06/how-inconsistent-design-will-save-itunes/

======
goodside
Without worrying about whether adaptive behavior like the article describes is
a good idea (I don't think it is), I want to take issue with this opening
paragraph:

"Are you the visual type of person that thrive in an environment of photos and
illustrations? Or do you prefer listening to a book instead of reading it? Or
do you want to touch everything to make sure you understand it?"

This is a watered-down restatement of the "learning styles" theory from
educational psychology that, while almost never stated explicitly or
coherently, is the view that different people have particular preferences for
either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning and interaction, and that
these learning style preferences are more or less stable over time. The usual
implication is that if you determine what a person's "style" is, you can adapt
whatever you're trying to teach them to incorporate their preferred medium,
and they will learn better than if you used, say, a visual lesson with an
auditory learner.

Despite its frequent repetition as fact in lay sources like this one, the
learning styles theory has never been substantiated by scientific research.
Assessments of learning styles show no predictive validity for individual
differences in response to instructional methods intended to focus one style
or another. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes, "After more than 30
years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent
evidence that VAK, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any
direct educational benefits."

"Learning styles" is bunk, and casually repeating it as though it were an
established mainstream theory is doing a disservice to science.

[End of slightly off-topic rant]

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CWuestefeld
_Just 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.

~~~
MWinther
I remember rummaging through the menus to find the menu item where one could
do that to... To make matters worse, they had one "Options..." and one
"Settings..." in the same menu, and I never remembered which one had those
settings in it, so I pretty much always had to go through two dialog boxes
before having the menus working properly again. Oh, the humanity!

------
MWinther
Apart 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.

~~~
Terretta
Agreed -- controls that reconfigure themselves disorient habitual users who
begin to rely on spatial memory.

Even the iPad's reflow of icons when rotated is mildly disorienting, even
though each group stays on its own page.

Ribbon bars and self-hiding menus do ok in focus groups for first time users
because they haven't yet formed spatial memory around the task.

Blur your eyes so you can't read text and you still know where the Edit menu
is. You know where it is, so that's where it should be.

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bonaldi
Horrible, 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.

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billybob
So when my Mom learns to Google for iTunes tips, she will follow a tutorial
and find that she's missing that UI element? And every tutorial step will
include "if you don't see this, maybe you're using an old version, or maybe
you need to hunt through the 'stuff that's been hidden' section and un-hide
it?"

I prefer the Kathy Sierra idea that your program should make your users feel
like "I am so smart", not "this program is so smart." Hiding stuff that you
JUST KNOW you saw one time makes the user feel stupid.

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devonrt
As 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.

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adolph
This could work if Apple added a intelligent navigation agent that maybe asked
you about where you wanted to go today. It could notice a brief pause in mouse
movement (indicating that the user is trying to think of where to go next) and
pop in and say, "Hi there human user, I'm L.P. Where do you want to go today?"
The avatar of the agent would be a friendly looking record and would offer to
reveal or hide various aspects of the user interface...

~~~
bruceboughton
Because software avatars proved so successful for Office...

This kind of thing is a kludge for an unfocussed, overly-featured app. Simple
apps that only do what you want are much better. Kind of like iPods...

~~~
adolph
OK, OK. How about this: Whenever the user launches iTunes, a non-modal dialog
box that looks like a comic book text box would appear from the system clock
and display a message like "You have unused features on your iTunes(tm). Would
you like to make things more confusing by hiding them?"

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bluemetal
If 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

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codejoust
Even autohide taskbars are annoying, I'm using a 10px gnome panel now, and
more command-line text search (built into nautilus). A problem with this
approach is also if I go over to a friend's house that doesn't ever use the
search box, I'll have to jump through hoops to even get to the search box, not
a good idea. Hiding user interfaces and dynamically adopting them could be a
good idea, but it makes the user think more, in an attempt to make them think
less. When helping others, uniformity is important.

If this site was like this, realizing that I read the whole comment thread
before commenting and moving the comment box to the bottom of the page for me,
it would be frustrating because I would sometimes scroll up and think I was
logged out, etc. (Big problem even when people accidentally remove UI elements
from a program such as safari by dragging them off the toolbar.)

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robgough
Of all my problems and concerns about iTunes. Not for a single moment have I
ever thought "I wish that search box was a bit bigger" or "that darn cover
flow icon is wasting too much space, I wish there was more blank grey space
here".

Performance increases will save iTunes. Not this horrendous "smart UI" idea.

I hate being so harsh in a comment, and feel mean for writing it. But iTunes
is one of the worst programs I use on a regular basis (I have an iPhone) and
practically dread using it, to the point where I don't sync my phone as often
as I'd like just to avoid the kludge. It makes my 2.4GHz MBP feel _slow_.
Nothing else makes it feel slow. They desperately need to rewrite this, and
I'm all for a radical UI change too - even if it was quick, I don't find it a
pleasure to use. It feels distinctly un-apple.

~~~
MWinther
When it comes to playing music and sync I still feel it works as expected,
even though I wouldn't mind a speedier experience. Of course, I have been
using it since version 3 sometime, so I'm used to it by now.

Where iTunes really feels inconsistent or non-intuitive for me is the video
section, where playback definitely doesn't feel Apple-y (Why does it blank my
primary screen when I do fullscreen video on my secondary, for instance?) I
would much rather have the option to open video in Quicktime Player rather
than having the sub-par experience within iTunes itself.

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UnknownSource
This 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.

~~~
NickPollard
I assume when referring to productivity benefits you are actually referring to
ease of learning? Command shells have huge productivity benefits if you know
how to use them, their Achilles heel is that it takes quite a while to get
used to and to the untrained user they are very daunting, whereas GUIs are
more intuitive.

~~~
UnknownSource
They have productivity benefits for some things true, but they don't expose or
constrain operations very well (ie, I have seen "professionals" do stuff like
"rm -rf ~/ folder" before accidentally) .

CLI's are generally only good at administration tasks (such as moving files
around). In the vast majority of cases though, a good GUI would probably be
more productive to work with.

But once again, that's my opinion. Until CLI's can expose tasks better, their
benefits will be limited.

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kennu
I don't think the real problem is with the idea of auto-adaptiveness but with
the implementations and their faulty assumptions.

E.g. I have one computer that I bring out maybe once a month at parties. It
should not think: "Okay, he hasn't used these playlists for a month, we can
hide them." Some computers are also shared between many users (using the same
account), so the adaptation logic would have to somehow realize that. And so
on.

I think Apple is wise in not trying to do something like this until it can be
done right. When it's done right, the user will never even realize it.
Everything will just seem even smoother and simpler than before.

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sdfx
It'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?

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daeken
If 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.

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Terretta
Aside from the unanimous agreement in these comments that this is a horrible
idea, I wish bloggers quit "loosing" themselves.

> _"I believe that it’s a healthy way of loosing control."_

Got a problem with incontinence? Keep it to yourself.

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jayair
iTunes may ask me if I want to re-arrange the controls but not remove it
without my permission.

