Q: dynamic playlist of unrated songs

[Jeff Mitchell]

Ben K wrote:
> I think Jeff meant how would you rate a song as zero stars.

Well, that too.  I can also think of some use-cases where people would
want to return a song from rated to unrated.  (I've done it, myself, if
I decided that I didn't like how I rated a particular group of songs and
wanted to clear the ratings from them without mixing up which ones I've
re-rated.)

> Having the
> user click on the far-left of the KRating object (ie the left of the
> far-left star) is hardly intuitive, and presents a very small target (2
> pixels wide?) that is hard to hit.

Yep.

> The data purist in me doesn't like zero meaning non-rated, but now that
> I think about it, making a UI to rate a song as zero seems tricky if not
> impossible to do right.

The problem is that right now you see all gray stars if there is no
rating.  But that's not because zero stars means non-rated, it's because
if the stars weren't there, people could very easily not realize that
that area is available to use to rate songs.  So the way it is now isn't
intuitive if you look at that and think "zero stars = unrated".

If, for instance, the stars disappeared until the mouse passed over the
area, then it would be far more clear that it's not that zero stars =
unrated, but that there simply is no rating on the track.  This could
lead to discoverability issues, though.  It's kinda damned if you do,
damned if you don't.

> Rating as half a star works right now, and
> doesn't require a bunch of extra work for what is, for all practical
> purposes, very little (to no) extra functionality.

Right.  But this whole discussion suggests that maybe there's a better
way to get all this across to the user.  Might be worth bringing in the
usability guys on this one.

--Jeff

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