Label buttons - one more time

[Gábor Lehel]

I've read through this whole discussion across several weeks and
several threads, and despite not having committed to Amarok in fifteen
billion years, please allow me to add my thoughts:

- It's pretty clear to me that just "adding the damn arrows", as per
Myriam's email (and more or less the same as that mockup), is the way
to go. What are the objections to this, again? That the arrows look
too clickable? Then make them clickable, for God's sake! The other
objection seems to be that the arrows are redundant once users figure
out the labels are clickable. Well: so what? Every UI is full of
informational elements which are rendered redundant once users figure
out what things do. But that's the entire point of having them there!
So that they can figure it out. They can't, otherwise. Conjecturing
that "gosh darn, we could save a lot of space in our UI if our users
were telepathic!" is fine and all, but unfortunately they're not.

I know you guys have been trying to finesse this by making the labels
themselves buttons, or various other kinds of visual clues, but every
mockup I've seen so far looks either goofy or unusable compared to
"just adding the damn arrows".

- Cycling the various metadata of the current track in the center
label over time, especially without having arrows next to the other
track labels next to it, is straight-out unusable. I know this because
it took me several minutes of looking at it cross-eyed and clicking
things before I figured out what the heck things did, and this was
*after* I had read the discussions here about the new toolbar
beforehand. Just put "Artist - Title" in a squeezedtextlabel (or two -
ideally you'd want to squeeze off the ends of the artist and title
separately) and be done with it.

- With regards to the volume dial, I think the best idea, as someone
else also suggested, is to leave the dial -- it looks cool as hell --
but make the dial part itself read-only. Have it indicate the current
volume in the circular thingie around the edge as now, but pop up a
slider when people click it. Naturally you'd then see the circular
level in the dial change as you move the slider, and it avoids having
to make annoying and unorthodox circular movements on the dial itself.
(And just mousewheeling on the dial should also still work fine.)

Click-volume-button-pop-up-slider should also be intuitive for
previous users of the slim toolbar.

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 11:32 PM, Lukas <1lukas1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html at
> least in web sites users usually scan application in F shape. In
> Amarok's case F shape covers labels, if staring point is play pause
> button. Most people are following their look with mouse, so i think it
> is rational to expect them to hover those labels.
>
> Another point, is how other clickable things in Amarok are presented.
> In short, not much of them looks like a real solid form buttons. Most
> of them are represented by bold (Not true for breadcrumb playlist sort
> navigation, but true for media sources navigation!!!! Usability bug?)
> But barely all of them has hover effect, changing background.
>
> So I do not see any reason, why labels could not be recognized as
> clickable items, if similar hover effect as in breadcrumb/track in
> playlist/etc (nice blue rectangle shape as background) would be used.
> Might be it is worth to make labels font bigger (size is some sort of
> indication of importance), at least the same size as used in
> breadcrumbs.
> Also shadow, as in Thomas last mockup, looks quite nice and eye caching.
>
> The next task, is to help user to understand, that those buttons is
> not "just some buttons, showing random tracks". but prev/next
>
> This can be done easily using animation. Its almost done, but by the
> time, i find it too fast. Making it ~0.5-1sec should be enough to
> catch the eye.
>
> This would also require to **delay OSD** appearance by ~3sec, as it
> goes on top of toolbar, and despite its transparent, it takes all the
> focus away.
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