Playlist Usability Testing

[Revak Colomar]

On Tuesday 28 April 2009 02:43:20 Dan Meltzer wrote:
> 1)  Up until recently, the behavior for all levels of the tree has
> been double clicks appends to playlist, single click selects, and
> clicking the "+" expands the node.  This behavior is familiar to most
> (if not all?) current users of Amarok.  Using a recent behavior change
> to justify more behavior changes seems silly to me... wouldn't another
> logical conclusion to take from the observation be that
> click-to-select should occur everywhere?

I'd suggest making the Amarok tree work like most other trees in KDE 4 (I just 
quickly checked Konqueror, Dolphin and KMail) and in most other environments 
as well afaik): Singe click to select, double click to expand/collapse. That 
way users who are new to Amarok can transfer their knowledge from other tree 
views. Some might find adding to the playlist by double clicking a nice 
shortcut, but there are already enough ways to add stuff to the playlist so I'd 
say we should not sacrifice consistency with the desktop for just one more way. 
In my opinion and experience, external consistency helps avoiding many 
usability traps, and sticking with Amarok 2's behavior so far doesn't beat 
sticking with KDE's behavior in the present and probably in the future.

About the finding that the participant exploring the dynamic playlist 
functionality didn't know how it worked: I'd suggest immediately populating 
the playlist after dynamic playlist is turned on for two reasons:
1. The user gets feedback that something happened
2. If the user didn't want her playlist to be populated dynamically, why would 
she turn the feature on anyway? Iirc Amarok 1.4 behaved that way as well and 
it didn't cause any major problems there, did it?

My compliments and thanks to Celeste for conducting the test, seeing actual 
users having problems makes things much clearer than listening to someone 
complaining about them.

Greetz,
Thomas