Amarok UI analysis, proposal - link inside

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

> Am Thursday 08 October 2009 schrieb Valentin Rouet:
> > Le jeudi 08 octobre 2009 12:06:33, Seb Ruiz a écrit :
> > > I like the symmetrical toolbar, I am violently against having split
> > >  controls.
> >
> > +1, a symmetrical toolbar would be great, but spliting controls is
> >  definitely not user friendly
> 
> *ggg* i just wanted to have put this option onto the table.
> 
> so we'll have to* go for vertical stacking and i repromote horizontal
> contraction in order to gain vertical space.
> a skecth on how this could work out on the default layout can be found here
> http://cloudcity.sourceforge.net/amarok/amarok.def.mid.png

Any ideas on how this would work with different layouts? 
I am just thinking that it might actually make sense to make the toolbar 
movable as well (at least horizontally) to allow users who want to keep their 
sources pane on the left but need the least vertical space for it to move the 
toolbar to the left. This would only make sense if we could come up with a 
toolbar that looks good anywhere. Allowing users to change the toolbar's 
position would again allow them to change Amarok's overall visual 
representation a lot, though.

But I must say again that taking choices away from the user isn't necessarily 
the only way to fight the cluttered UIs and oversizes configuration dialogs of 
the KDE3 days. KDE4 in general isn't about leaving less control to the user 
but about coming up with more elegant ways for the user to make choices (see 
the article under  http://www.kdenews.org/2009/10/21/kde4-demonstrates-choice-
not-usability-problem ).

I think allowing the user to reorder the UI with drag and drop was very much 
in line with "The KDE4 way". It is easy to do, doesn't need any controls to be 
permanently visible and gives the user quite a lot of freedom. 

The drag & drop layout or autotagging editor is another example (though it 
still has a lot of room for improvement in the details). It is quite a 
powerful tool, yet it offers novice users a non-scary way to exercise that 
power, whereas advanced users can still use the faster text box variant.

So I strongly vote for giving users freedom as long as that freedom doesn't 
come at the cost of usability.

Regards,
Thomas
> 
> Thomas
> 
> *yet another way could be a more 4d approach that would allow us to bring
>  the position slider XOR the controls to "front" dynamically (but what also
>  implies to detect what teh user currently wants)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Amarok-devel mailing list
> Amarok-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok-devel
>