User Centered

At the sake of making this a site dedicated to Apple's podcast UI management, I'd like to point out yet another change that came about with the 3.0 iPhone software update, but first, see the history of this topic on the site to get up to speed, also, Kenneth Maage's thoughts in the comments here are pretty insightful as well for a "how it should work" argument.

The scrubber (left-to-right slider) is very difficult to use with podcasts, and was a poor design decision.

...The fact that Apple added the 30 second rewind and the following scrubber fixes is enough evidence in the "user centered" court of law to state the above.

Well, 3.0 has another kludge up its sleeve that I stumbled upon. Now, when you place your finger on the scrubber a contextual message appears instructing you to pull your finger down to adjust the rate at which the scrubber will move through the track- the further you move your finger down, the slower it moves through the track. Let me paint you picture: You put your finger on the scrubber button, the message pops up, you drag your finger down and as you, the rate of movement through the podcast will slow down. You then move your finger left of right to move as normal, all this without picking up your finger.

There's a couple points of discussion here:

1. As I've said in the past- you have a dynamic, touchscreen UI, take advantage of that! They tried this with the gesturing, two dimensional scrubbing maneuver, but they still tie it to the traditional left/right scrubber!
   
2. ...which is the silly design decision here- we're moving an object at the top of the screen but our finger is positioned (in the case of "fine") nowhere near it! I think "kludge" is the kindest word I can come up with for how this interaction works. I'm all for having advanced features that are "value add" as long as they don't detract from the functionality of the product for those unaware (ex: Opera's mouse gestures); this attempts to be one of those, but considering the original functionality can hardly be called functional for anyone (advance or not) really makes me scratch my head.
   
3. Maybe I just need practice- but in actual use, I'm not sure this is all that useful. I found myself moving my finger up and down, left and right and losing the context of what I wanted to hear,...okay, this one is an anecdote, I retract it
   
4. ...but it's probably because they start out "fastest" and have you move your finger farther down the screen to get to the "slowest/finest" granularity. Of course, we're humans, and we can't move our limbs in precise, linear motions. The result is that as I'm moving my finger down to more finer granularity, there are slight movements to the left and right which cause the audio to jump around quite a bit (since they're higher speeds) and I'm "lost" before I finally get to the slower speeds. Keep in mind, the reason this was added was because the faster scrubs are worthless. It seems to me, that excusing all the previous points (ie- I wouldn't design it this way to begin with), it would make more sense to start out "fine" and drag your finger down to get higher speed scrubbing (the zoom out metaphor), but given the established UI expectations, this wouldn't make sense, you'd have to have a default fine scrub first.
   

I think I'll find some use of this feature, but I think it's mostly because I'm into these features much more than (I expect) the general population. I'll add it up to one more band-aid on an interface that is really starting to show it could use a "rethinking." It would be more useful if they ditched the "scrubber" widget on the screen and put something up that really conveyed this functionality. I'd suggest looking at kmaage's comments on the previous post for ideas on how to make these functions actually useful.

Anyone who's been around this site for awhile (all three of you) knows that I have a long standing series of beefs with Apple on how they handle podcasts on the iPod/iPhone. In summation- Apple initially treated the UI for podcasts very much like that for music/songs and have subsequently updated with a series of patches and band-aids to compensate that slowly increment towards a passable podcast UI.


Apple's new iPhone software includes another one of these fixes that is likely spurned on by the same issues I brought up in my previous post on this topic- the seek and slider functions are terrible ways to get around a podcast track. So, they've provided a very welcome "30 second" rewind function. Also gone are the shuffle and repeat functions, which didn't make a lot of sense for podcasts in my opinion anyway (more music thinking transposed to podcasts)

It's welcome, but I still consider this a patch. We now have three different ways on the same screen to move around the track: Seek, slider, and 30 seconds. More UI equals more decision points and more complication. I suppose it would be passable to do this, but as I pointed out before, the first two are pretty much worthless for long podcasts, the seek function is too clumsy and the slider is impossible to do anything with accuracy. The original iPod click wheel did a decent job of allowing you to move around the track with few problems, I had no issues with that interaction.

I feel like this whole podcast UI needs a "from scratch" redesign- perhaps my next related post will be a mockup of a series of ideas I've had over the years, since Apple seems to only pay enough attention to podcasts to add one small feature with each release that only slightly moves the bar forward.

Way back in 2002, I found a little web browser called Opera that had this feature that just blew me out of the water...mouse gestures.

Since I've become to rely on them for browsing, I'm also looking at all the other plugins and extensions that extend this functionality to other pieces of software and interfaces.

Phones now have accelerometers that detect 3D movement, so it seems natural to use movement and gestures to perform functions on the phone.

I've just viewed the video for this phonepoint pen project by Duke students that uses the movement to translate and do OCR on captured movement to text. I think this is interesting, but not very practical. Instead, I'd like to capture the movement and translate them directly to commands. Keeping with the Opera browser mindset, I'm picturing a handful of easy to perform gestures that are one or two linear movements that can be turned into key phone functionality. Apple is tapping into this idea, they just announced "voice control" and they have a handful of physical based gestures- but they are just on the tip of the iceberg: they have "shake to undo" or "shake to refresh" functionality, but this can be extended...

• Speed Dialing a phone number (one gesture for each favorite contact)
  
• Launching a browser
  
• Initiate a desktop-to-mobile sync/handshake
  
• Move data from phone to desktop
  
• Copy, paste, delete, add...
  
• Refreshing the current view (existing)
  
• Shake to undo (exsiting)
  
• launch maps and use current location (ideal for auto based "where am I?" queries)
  

But mainly things you'd be likely to in an automobile or need to get at frequently and quickly...what I like about gestures, is that you can do them without paying attention to the interface- there's no mental/cognitive cycles spent doing mundane interface manipulation. You're using muscle memory. Like my browser mouse gestures, I can still be in the middle of finishing up scanning the text of the page and close the page without any movement to the "x" button (or any real thought). at the sake of going off on my mouse gesture tangent, I'll leave it at "if you get it, you get it, if not, you don't" and just press on: On the mobile device, this opportunity is greater. I think this is easier to use than even physical speed dial buttons since you'll have to orient your hand to the phone and find the right button. With a physical gesture, you can find a single "activate" button (which would be consistent for all gestures of course) and then just let your muscle memory do the flailing!

I can think of some contexts & settings where voice controlling would be more appropriate, and I can certainly think of times when it would be more discrete to swipe your phone quietly through the air.

Anyway, I'm almost certain that someone already has some form of this out that goes beyond the "shake to X" functionality, so I suppose I should just wait patiently for someone to point it out in the comments. I've seen the speed dialer app that lets you make a gesture on the screen of the iPhone to dial someone, but that has none of the advantages of abstracted UI that I mentioned.

We got new chairs at the office. They are really nice, and I'm certainly grateful to have an un-stained, new comfortable chair, particularly in these tough economic times.

...but I can't help but laugh at these instructions that came along with it. It's hard to think a chair could be so complicated, but well, there you go...

I suppose the product design team and testers over at Apple have "casual day" all during the week- or at least they don't rock the super cool "no tie" dress shirt like this business casual author is prone to do.

I say this because anyone who's spent any time with a)iPhone headphones and b) a collar would notice that the headphone "clicker" is perfectly designed to catch on the edge of my collar every time I turn my head.

How about you smooth over that hard edge Apple?