User Centered

This article was rewritten/updated.

Please see: iTunes as a Podcast Manager: it's time for an intervention for revised version

iTunes+iPod has always been great for me as far as music is concerned. Playlist management and the iPod interface have not always had EVERY feature I wanted or needed, but simplicity is the selling point and well frankly, it sold me. "Less is more." By limiting the feature set to create a simple UI, you've created "more" in terms of the user experience. I agree.

But lately, my iPod is almost exclusively (emphasis on almost) used for podcasts, and I’ve found iTunes to not match exactly the|my real world usage of podcasts (activity centered anyone?)

Here are a couple UI quirks I've found that make me think "less" is actually less when dealing with podcasts-


Repeat

This is a useful feature on playlists of music, but has little value to podcasts. I always want
my music to loop back through the playlist, but I never want my podcasts to loop. iPod can only let you set one. If I'm listening to music- I prefer to select repeat. Podcast? Turn it off. I’ve found (maybe it’s just the podcasts I listen to) that sometimes it’s not so easy to tell you’ve looped back to the beginning, and conversly, when your music playlist ends when you're hitting 9MPH on the treadmill- that's also a let down.


Limited choice of syncing

The options available are perfect for one podcast, but not another. Variations in publishing/syndication lead to variation in how why should sync them. The "one size fits all" approach to updating your podcasts keeps the interface simple, but at the cost of being useful...

• Unplayed podcast This is a podcast specific feature (as far as I know)- but some podcasts I get (like the onion news) are only a minute at best, and some are an hour. If I’m only 20 minutes into one and I want to keep it around, I have to disable automatically sync, because otherwise as soon as I dock it, the unfinished episode has to be marked as unplayed and re-sync'd (and then, I have to FF/find where I was again)
  
  
• Most recent episode- some podcasts are published every once in awhile (PK&J show) and some are published multiple times a day (Armstrong and Getty is a radio show that publishes each hour of a four hour show, every day). Most recent episode is good for infrequent podcasts, but daily (or multiple per day) podcasts require dedicated daily syncs and the potential to miss some.
  
  
• Only Checked- labor intensive. Seems like this is my only choice for the large variety of podcasts I listen too. But each podcast doesn't need to "managed" on a daily basis. I'd like to set it once for each podcast. The PK&J show? Get the most recent. Armstrong and Getty? Get all of em...etc.
  

Auto update

It only updates when you dock it. I dock it when I get home from work and pick it up in the morning on my way out the door….after every podcast I know of has sent out updates. So I have to manually sync it before grab it. I realize iTunes doesn’t know when you’re going to grab it. But how about if it updates the iPod whenever it searches for & updates new podcasts?


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How about allowing us to set preferences for each podcast? Too complex? Would that clutter the UI too much? Less is more, simplicity is key? How about “activity centered design is the key to simplicity” instead? Build your UI to enhance my activities. In my opinion, podcasts management (as well as the searching via iTunes, but that is a different post entirely) is an afterthought.

Perhaps simplicity is still the key here. Maybe iTunes tried to cram podcast functionality into a music manager. In 37Signals mantra- maybe two simple interfaces are needed that are designed for the intended activity. Are podcasts different from music? Should the UI treat them differently?

You may immediately tell me to “use product 'X' instead of iTunes- and that’s fine. But I really do appreciate the integrated music store, syncing and management of iTunes and my iPod. But if you have a better solution that allows me to sit at my desk, dock my iPod and get my music and podcasts sync’d, I’d listen.