New toolbar navigation

[Bart Cerneels]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 00:02, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
> Hey team,
> I'm writing this as a fresh user of the new toolbar - i haven't
> participated in any of the discussions or seen any mock ups prior to
> compiling and using the new toolbar this morning, and I wanted to
> provide some feedback:
>
> 1. How do I navigate to the next and prev track? This was totally
> unobvious, and I only discovered how after using the global shortcuts
> and seeing the UI move. Clearly I have to click on the name of the
> song on the right hand side of the toolbar. Yet this can be really
> confusing; since the text cycles between the various metadata that is
> available. Clicking on a piece of text that says "2006" is mind
> boggling. What would convince a user to click on that; the text looks
> nothing more than informational. This leads me to my second point:
>
> 2. Clicking on the metadata has various inconsistencies. IMO, a
> general rule to follow when designing a gui is that of "the principle
> of least surprise". Clicking on the prev/next text labels navigate
> prev/next through the playlist. Clicking on the current track labels
> filters the collection browser by the current text that you've
> clicked. If I click on the text "12" (in this case, happens to be the
> track number) this causes the collection browser to show me all items
> which have the text "12" within them. This seems to make no sense and
> add little to no value to the product. What is the rationale behind
> this functionality?
>
> 3. The text cycles very slowly when the mouse is not hovering, but
> very quickly when the mouse moves over the labels. This means that
> clicking on these labels is a bit useless, since they change so
> quickly when I see something I want to click.
>
> 4. The text labels have useless information: why show the year and track number?
>
> 5. Changing the volume precisely with a mouse press is very difficult.
> It seems to jump everywhere even with a few pixels of movement.
>
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Seb Ruiz
>

I agree with all of this. Changes need to be made before the freeze.

The label text is the most urgent: change it to "%track %title -
%artist". The next label should be prefixed with "Next Track: " and
"Previous Track: ". Perhaps you can change the label size (and add
extra info) when there is enough room. I'm sure Thomas can figure that
out and implement it quickly.

Alternative to adding next/previous to the labels, add those arrow
buttons that was talked about.

Bart