[UI] QML CV usability feedback

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
I've now compiled the QML branch of Amarok and will give some feedback to the 
new Context View, as promised about a month ago. I'm addressing the whole list 
since I'm not sure who will be working on the CV in the near future.

First of all: I really like the look of the new CV! It's much cleaner and 
fits better with the rest of Amarok's appearance compared to the old 
one. I'd recommend changing the blue boxes at the bottom of the collection and 
playlist areas to some shade of grey as well though, since now without the 
CV's blue, they look rather out of place. 

Now for the usability feedback: It's a bit difficult to give much feedback on 
the current state, because the more tricky things (like the integration of 
additional CV "modules" or their configuration) are not implemented yet. Of 
course the good thing about it is that we can work together on interaction 
design for those things before they are implemented, which is less work than 
having to change things afterwards.
My feedback to what's currently there:
- The icons look nice in monochrome, but currently they lack a bit in "click 
affordance", meaning that it isn't obvious right away that they are actual 
buttons vs. merely information icons, because they look very different to the 
other button icons in Amarok. Maybe some very very slight plasticity effect 
might help there. Perhaps you should ask the KDE artists team if they can 
create icons for you which look clearly like clickable icons while still 
fitting visually in the CV?
- Unless you plan to re-implement the drag-mouseover feature of the old CV, 
the CV should definitely be placed on the right of the UI instead of the center 
by default now. The mouseover options were the only argument 
for keeping the CV in the center before, and with that removed, it would just 
make no sense at all to keep it there and forcing users to drag items all the 
way over the CV to the playlist.
- I think placing the different content types (lyrics, Wikipedia, etc.) in one 
long column that can be scrolled continuously instead of switching between 
them would be better. Of course users could still scroll directly to each type 
with buttons above, but they could also scroll through them continually. The 
advantage would be that a user interested in everything about the current song 
could just read on from lyrics to Wikipedia to e.g. concert dates without 
having to click any buttons, bzt can still use the buttons to jump to a 
specific type of information.
- I don't know what exactly the new CV currently pulls in from Wikipedia, but 
it isn't the artist's main article. The main article would make more sense 
here, since the things currently shown are not very informative.

And finally for the future interaction design:
First of all, I'd need to know which features of the old CV you are planning 
to re-implement and which ones you are planning to cut. Depending on these 
decisions, we can start working on interaction design for the planned 
features.

I'm looking forward to working with the Amarok team again (and now I've finally 
got the hang of compiling Amarok master or branches from Git easily, so I can 
try things out immediately)!

Thomas

P.S.: I'd like to establish the [UI] tag for UI-related threads on this list 
so that people like me who don't understand purely technical threads anyway 
can concentrate on the threads relevant for them. If that's okay with you 
guys, I'd appreciate if you could add that tag to the subjects of UI-related 
mails in the future.