Our bird blue prints are coming together quickly now. It’s been my job to make Songbird’s user experiences easy and integrated. Now that our proof-of-concept has gotten us this far, we are free to make a few necessary changes to our visual and behavioral user experiences.
We are also addressing a number of accesibility issues that our proof-of-concept elicited from our early “fans.” That said, I’ve been doing competitive-analysis and necessary research to determine how we should make Songbird design decisions.
I’ve heard a lot of hype of about Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11). CNET gave it quite the beaming review. While the editors (who may have liked the flavor of Kool-Aid that day) gave it a stunning 8 of 10, the average user, who didn’t get Kool-Aid, gave it a 6.2 of 10. I have to admit, the press made WMP 11’s new interface look pretty simple and useful.
As one who enjoys to learn his own lessons, I eagerly downloaded and installed WMP 11 and was immediately able to do everything I needed a media player to do. I also noticed that it did a wonderful number of other things to improve the visual browsing of a collection. If you like Windows Explorer, well you’re in luck. The WMP 11 team found all of their inspiration there, and you’ll be wonderfully amused at how they’ve shoe-horned a music-browser into a file-browser’s clothes. In any case, while these are certain to spawn innovations, I was also delighted to see other “innovations” in the basic parts of the interface.
Following in Apple’s design-sucking vacuum, WMP 11 sports Auto-Album art! After scanning my computer for media, WMP 11 provided me an album art view with pre-loaded album art. Take that iTunes!!! But upon closer inspection, I noticed that the album art wasn’t real!
I suppose when you’re so close to the finish, hooking up an album art provider just couldn’t make it to the beta list. And why should it, that’s such a webby thing to do, this is a media player, not a web browser!
I know this is a nit, but any serious music person—or anyone with enough attention span to notice—is also going to notice that the currently playing display is also befuddlingly simple. How do you take simple too far? Let WMP 11 show us the way:
Now I know you’re all post-rock fans, so it’s OBVIOUS what is displayed above. And out of three choices, Artist, Album or Song, you’ll be right even if you guess blindly about 33% of the time. I guess if I can learn a one lesson out of every three I’m taught, that’s not bad.
7 Comments
SubscribeSongbird lacks a visual way of browsing your library, but I guess that can be fixed easily.
Ahh yest WMP11 got to love a media player that takes 25% of a 2.5Ghz cpu to do the animation around the buttons while on “Now Playing”, you must be playing at the time… Low CPU resource especially while idle would be great…
JBlog
There definitely need to be something done about the browser view window. With the current sidebar, most web pages get cut off on my screen resolution (1024 x 768). Simple fix, auto hide sidebar. Harder fix..come up with something cool and creative to fix the problem.
PS, don’t forget tabbed browsing
I think it would be cool, if you could switch the sidebar to a mediabrowser, with albumarts.
The album art feature that you speak of has been in WMP since I believe version 10.
?
But now it’s on by default. Hooray.
The main thing I want Songbird to do that windows media player does, is to have a nice taskbar player. I don’t want to have to click on anything to get to controls. Also, in WMP10, there was a pop-up arrow that would allow you to browse text lists of artists, albums, playlists, etc. This was taken out in WMP11, but I would like a button to pop up the Jump To dialog from the taskbar player in Songbird….assuming a taskbar player is ever developed.
A taskbar player for Windows would be a nice feature. I like the current mini-player feature but without any sort of hover or layering (not sure of the precise jargon), it can get buried in windows pretty quickly.