Wednesday, September 26. 2007
Playlist mockup, part deux
After Nikolaj's brilliant work on the new playlist, people have started making lots of thinky thoughts and such, which is a brilliant thing - the problem is, of course, that we have been making those exact thinky thoughts ourselves(*), and as such, here i am blogging the mockup i've already referred to in Nikolaj's entry a few times. So, with no further ado, here's a link to my little mockup, done while bored in a lecture, but after considerable amounts of prior thought and suchlikes 
A slight further explanation from a comment in Nikolaj's entry. To understand how the tracks in this playlist works, imagine the following logic:
Take any track in the playlist:
(*) Just to make sure this is not taken as snotty-nosed-ness - Really just saying this so that people's well-tuned mental energy can be spent thinking thoughts that haven't been thought already
And, of course, in the name of openness, something i'm not so good at doing like this (i normally just talk in channel rather than sit here and blog, as i am sure can be told from my... style, shall we say )
A slight further explanation from a comment in Nikolaj's entry. To understand how the tracks in this playlist works, imagine the following logic:
Take any track in the playlist:
- If the track before this one is an album header, show this track without shared information (but with album cover replaced with total album group duration (length of all tracks from said album in the current group))
- If the track before this one is in stead the second track (above) or a similar track to this, do not show shared information and also not album group duration.
(*) Just to make sure this is not taken as snotty-nosed-ness - Really just saying this so that people's well-tuned mental energy can be spent thinking thoughts that haven't been thought already
And, of course, in the name of openness, something i'm not so good at doing like this (i normally just talk in channel rather than sit here and blog, as i am sure can be told from my... style, shall we say )
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Wow! What is that theme you're using?! Very retro. Can I get it from kde-look?
In fact, you essentially can! http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Reinhardt+Sketch?content=34232
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Reinhardt+Sketch?content=34232
Awesome! I was just joking, but I should have known that somebody already thought of it. That'll teach me not to underestimate the community!
giggles Yeah It's amazing what people get out of your work, i was -very- surprised to see this one giggles very well done too
It's amazing what people get out of your work, i was -very- surprised to see this one giggles very well done too
hey take a look to my work
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/My+amarok+playlist?content=66926
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/My+amarok+playlist?content=66926
Dude, that is totally incredible! I hope Amarok 2 is that beautiful.
Really OT... but what is that thing in the background? "The Unlucky 13"?
laughs! Oh, yeah... i didn't notice that one when i took the picture - it's the EuroFurence 13 convention handbook
Nice work. Have you given your design a real test, in addition to giving it a good thought?
You already have everything necessary to perform a paper prototype of your interface: just cut that paper with scissors, put it in front of a guinea pig and see how well they manage to organize their info. You should have one piece of paper for every state of the interface, and switch them according to the actions of your user.
You already have everything necessary to perform a paper prototype of your interface: just cut that paper with scissors, put it in front of a guinea pig and see how well they manage to organize their info. You should have one piece of paper for every state of the interface, and switch them according to the actions of your user.
No, i have not performed a test of this interface, i simply do not have the time for that - between uni (lectures and a semester project) and a stable freelancing position i've landed with a company here in Aalborg, i simply do not have the time to conduct a proper test... So in stead i would like for people here to test it out, if possible, in the wisdom of the masses mindset.
However, if you are offering to conduct this test, that would be very welcome (any clarifications you would need could be provided). (Paper prototyping is FUN, but takes a LONG time to do properly... and i just don't have that sort of time, right now )
However, if you are offering to conduct this test, that would be very welcome (any clarifications you would need could be provided). (Paper prototyping is FUN, but takes a LONG time to do properly... and i just don't have that sort of time, right now
)
Also, a thing to keep in mind is that, sans proper support for dragging stuff around and a fancy visual style, it is already implemented. I think in this case it would be better to get it working and then do around of "Cafe testing" (I think it was Aaron who highly recommended this kind of concept testing at aKademy )
I've been reading this blog and other articles about amarok 2.0 for quite some time now and I've been very skeptical about the new playlist design (nevertheless, I did not ever attack any of you for making the choices you did). Since I really love amarok so far the whole discussion forced me to think about the way I actually listen to music. So let me try to describe it and maybe give a hint for future development (as you've requested in your post).
I am a huge Pearl Jam fan and buy all their albums. They also publish (partly for free) a bootleg of each and every concert they give. So my collection is filled with 200+ albums of Pearl Jam alone making the context browser quite slow btw Anyway, I like to listen to the concerts and like to keep some rarely played songs and extraordinary versions of songs in my current playlist. If I was now using the collection browser to search for a single song (e.g. Black) I would come up with 100 different live versions of the same song and would have to remember which version was the one I like so much -> that just doesn't work even though I use the collection browser for many other things. This is the reason I thought that the new amarok design was just extremely bad for my user case.
But since you've given the whole program so much thought and effort I at least wanted to give the most prominent features in amarok 2.0 a try in the current 1.4 layout to see if they might still work, even though I was pretty sure that dynamic playlists would not work out as well for me as having a column-view-playlist filled with 1100 songs.
Well, in my opinion with amarok 1.4 it's really not such a good idea to do so. Dynamic playlists are not even working correctly (if I want to display more than 10 songs ahead it fills the playlist with 100+ songs...). Furthermore, the playlist is not really made for this kind of useage. Neither are the collection browser or the "saved playlists browser". But when I tried it out, I also realized the huge potential that you guys are trying to lift and I am already anxious to see for myself some first results in a few weeks.
So let me tell you what I feel will be needed to make it a success. Since you are already putting much effort in re-designing the old playlist format and the screenshots you have taken look promising I will not focus on this part. First let me talk about my useage pattern: My favorite dynamic playlist would probably be based on one playlist I've saved containing 1,000+ tracks and would let the current playlist be filled with 20-30 tracks automatically. But since I also like to drop some tracks in that I like to listen to right now and I have quite a large collection this is not so easy to handle with the collection browser. I would rather need a well structured "saved playlists browser". So I would really appreciate some redesign of the saved playlists browser in the context menu. You should be able to customize the view in this part just like in the collection browser in amarok 1.4 (sorting by artist, album, track etc.) and also featuring a search tab. I would then scroll around in the saved playlists browser or in the collection browser on the left and drop some songs in the current playlist on the right.
So I hope that I could write down my thoughts in an understandable manner and give you some constructive criticism. Even though I was quite skeptical about the new playlist design I have actually no reason to distrust you since you've already delivered such a great program and continue to strive to make it even better. So I tried to think about your ideas and realized the huge potential you're trying to lift. So let's make amarok 2.0 rock ever more! Keep up the great work and thank you so much for your effort!!!
I am a huge Pearl Jam fan and buy all their albums. They also publish (partly for free) a bootleg of each and every concert they give. So my collection is filled with 200+ albums of Pearl Jam alone making the context browser quite slow btw
Anyway, I like to listen to the concerts and like to keep some rarely played songs and extraordinary versions of songs in my current playlist. If I was now using the collection browser to search for a single song (e.g. Black) I would come up with 100 different live versions of the same song and would have to remember which version was the one I like so much -> that just doesn't work even though I use the collection browser for many other things. This is the reason I thought that the new amarok design was just extremely bad for my user case.But since you've given the whole program so much thought and effort I at least wanted to give the most prominent features in amarok 2.0 a try in the current 1.4 layout to see if they might still work, even though I was pretty sure that dynamic playlists would not work out as well for me as having a column-view-playlist filled with 1100 songs.
Well, in my opinion with amarok 1.4 it's really not such a good idea to do so. Dynamic playlists are not even working correctly (if I want to display more than 10 songs ahead it fills the playlist with 100+ songs...). Furthermore, the playlist is not really made for this kind of useage. Neither are the collection browser or the "saved playlists browser". But when I tried it out, I also realized the huge potential that you guys are trying to lift and I am already anxious to see for myself some first results in a few weeks.
So let me tell you what I feel will be needed to make it a success. Since you are already putting much effort in re-designing the old playlist format and the screenshots you have taken look promising I will not focus on this part. First let me talk about my useage pattern: My favorite dynamic playlist would probably be based on one playlist I've saved containing 1,000+ tracks and would let the current playlist be filled with 20-30 tracks automatically. But since I also like to drop some tracks in that I like to listen to right now and I have quite a large collection this is not so easy to handle with the collection browser. I would rather need a well structured "saved playlists browser". So I would really appreciate some redesign of the saved playlists browser in the context menu. You should be able to customize the view in this part just like in the collection browser in amarok 1.4 (sorting by artist, album, track etc.) and also featuring a search tab. I would then scroll around in the saved playlists browser or in the collection browser on the left and drop some songs in the current playlist on the right.
So I hope that I could write down my thoughts in an understandable manner and give you some constructive criticism. Even though I was quite skeptical about the new playlist design I have actually no reason to distrust you since you've already delivered such a great program and continue to strive to make it even better. So I tried to think about your ideas and realized the huge potential you're trying to lift. So let's make amarok 2.0 rock ever more! Keep up the great work and thank you so much for your effort!!!
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