Usability Forum

iPhone podcast UI is incrementing towards "good"

By Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez. Thursday, June 18, 2009 3:55:49 PM

UI, iPod, Shuffle, design, simplicity, Apple, podcasts, minmalist, donald norman, iTunes

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.

Opera Unite is how I envision the web. <--periodUpdate: Design Decisions: iPhone (focus on podcasts)

Comments

Kenneth Maagekmaage # Friday, June 19, 2009 8:35:36 AM

30 seconds is all wrong.

With the iPhone able to do that song wizard thing where it listens to what is playing on your radio and figures out what song it is, I would think Apple would be able to design a skip back button that intelligently repeats what you missed.

Here's why I think it's possible:
1) Humans need and want to hear something from the "beginning of the thought" if they missed something. We welcome the extra context. It aids in understanding the part we missed.

2) Human speech is full of "natural breaks" that could be analyzed. Volume differences, rhythm changes, silences, pitch rises and fall offs, etc.

3) If you jump back 3 seconds one time but 5.2 seconds a different time, no one is going to notice or care. Humans are terrible at perceiving time very precisely, so there is a lot of wiggle room without people complaining about an inconsistent interface.

4) Multiple presses can be quite useful, using a somewhat logarithmic scale, with longer jumps the more times you press it, since our idea of "that part" relates to bigger and bigger sections the further back we go, because we remember less of the details.

5) You could replace the seek buttons with this "intelligent skip," replace the slider with a information-only progress bar and simplify the interface immensly, solving the problem of the slider vs. volume to boot.

Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez # Sunday, June 21, 2009 4:23:11 AM

Those are excellent, excellent suggestions and points.

I admit, as much as I keep calling their updates "band-aids" and kludges, I'm thinking along the same lines. Your points however, are rethinking this whole thing to a more user centered design.

Wonderful!

Kenneth Maagekmaage # Sunday, June 21, 2009 1:14:49 PM

And I don't even listen to that many podcasts! If someone like me can come up with some useful design changes, what are they doing over at Apple, swimming in all their money all day?

Anonymous # Monday, June 22, 2009 10:51:52 PM

Anonymous writes: i just want the shuffle button back. i used it all the time. and its gone, how do i set my playlist to shuffle, and by shuffle i mean 'random play' not the skip to another song type of shuffle the shake thing does.

Anonymous # Wednesday, July 1, 2009 7:15:43 PM

Anonymous writes: Only one change? You didn't mention -- the great variable speed scrubbing added with the 3.0 update. After pressing the scrubbing (slider) handle, hold down finger, slide it down, for increasingly fine scrubbing speeds. Pretty much fixes the problem for long podcasts. Works for music and video too. -- extending the playback speed changes from audiobooks to all podcasts.

Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez # Thursday, July 2, 2009 2:05:48 PM

Anon-
http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/2009/06/21/more-band-aids-from-apple-for-the-poorly-designed-iphone-podcast-ui

"Great" is a bit of an overstatement.

Anonymous # Sunday, September 20, 2009 7:08:42 PM

Valerie writes: So, how about a 30-second fast forward?

Anonymous # Thursday, January 7, 2010 4:37:01 AM

Anonymous writes: I would like the 30 second think to work everywhere, not just podcasts as many of the lectures and such I listen to are simple mp3 files and not on my iPhone as podcasts. The mechanism on the iPod was not good - I often was trying to rewind and would accidentally make it go back to the beginning of a lecture. The ability to change the ballistics of the slider is not a big gain. The slider is still to small and finicky to operate and often that stupid Genius button actuates and pops up that damn dialog telling me Genius is not enabled - that's right, I don't use or want the Genius thing. What I want is an easy-to-use control to rewind and fast forward lectures.

Anonymous # Tuesday, February 1, 2011 4:16:17 PM

Anonymous writes: Taking out the repeat button was a poor decision. It is critical for language podcasts or other instructionals. I also like shuffle for the same reason... listening to the same language podcast in the same order all the time is EXTREMELY boring.