This is a proofread blog post version of a banshee mailing list post I just made. The UI changes aren’t drastic, or dramatic, but I think they’re a nice improvement, and I’m really just in this hacker game for the glory and the gifts.
I spent the last two days hacking away at some minor changes to the interface (and a tone of other stuff that’s awaiting patch review in bugzilla), and just posted my patch. I wanted to include the community in the UI review. The tl;dr; version is that I got rid of the next button that included the shuffle options, replacing it with a normal next button, and moved shuffle and repeat to the bottom left hand corner.
Here’s my justification/impetus for implementing this change:
A friend of mine uses Ubuntu. She’s not a computer nerd: she’s in college for education, likes twee, punk, and doing needlepoint. I would say the ideal target user. Technical enough to install Ubuntu on her own, use it, surf the web, etc., but not a programmer, or “power user” (whatever that really means).
We were hanging out one day (she knows that I work on Banshee), and she asked me why she could only shuffle in the play queue. She wanted to just listen to whatever is in her library randomly, without having to queue her entire library and click shuffle.
Obviously I was confused, because of course you can shuffle while playing from the library. Duh, right? Everyone knows that. Apparently not. Before she had noticed/clicked the arrow for the shuffle options, she saw the giant shuffle button in the play queue.
She saw this, and assumed this was how you shuffle. Reasonable, even if a little bit of a defeatist attitude. But that’s the nature of usability. Not everyone will go digging through the interface and documentation to try and figure out how to do something. Maybe that’s the difference between a casual user and a power user.
So we have a problem. That button in the play queue should probably be renamed as well, but there’s also the issue that she never later accidentally discovered the shuffle menu.
So here’s my solution. Keep in mind pretty much everything I say about shuffle button also applies to the repeat button.
This is just the normal banshee interface, no repeat, no shuffle. Looks fine. See the new buttons in the bottom left? Spiffy right? (NOTE: the job spinner just moved to the right side of the bar).
When I was trying to show her how to set shuffle, she had songs in her queue, so the arrow was disabled. This also confused me until I figured out that shuffle disabled itself when there were songs in the queue. My branch adds a tooltip to the desensitized elements so that you know why you can't shuffle. Repeat has similar text.
The menus are the same menus you're used to from the old next button menu.
When shuffle is enabled, the button remains pressed so that you know shuffle is on, and I added a tooltip that tells you what it will be shuffled by.
So here’s something that went away; I got rid of the different icons for repeat.
- I think they’re kind of ugly.
- They’re not really necessary here. It’s good to know if repeat is on or off, but the toggled state tells you that faster than the icon does, and for knowing if repeat one or all is one, well you’ll find out when the same song keeps playing on repeat. It’s not really all that useful to have the repeat type displayed all of the time. You will long in the length of 1 song if repeat is one or all.
I think that’s it. Please give me your feedback, and if you love what I do, don’t forget I’ve got a birthday coming up real soon 