May 28, 2003
Full Screen Isn't
Blockbuster continues to waffle on its position on fullscreen versus widescreen titles. At least, each time I go to the store and talk to the clerk I get a different story: yes, we've switched to only Full Screen DVDs at the request of our customers, no, we've gotten a lot of complaints so we're still offering Widescreen versions.I go to Blockbuster when Netflix simply doesn't ship fast enough. But I hate going to Blockbuster because a) I have a Netflix account and I shouldn't need two rental sources and b) Blockbuster really is only offering Full Screen on an increasing number of new releases. And full screen ISN'T full screen, as we all know.
So to celebrate the launch of the Nettle Store, I hereby offer the first three goods:
The store is located at http://www.cafepress.com/nettle. Let me know what other stuff you'd like to see in there!
May 22, 2003
Rivers and Tides
Now, the last thing you'd expect to see in a blog that purports to be about user experience, design, and branding is a movie review, but nonetheless here goes:
If you get a chance, go see Rivers and Tides, a documentary about a Scottish artist named Andy Goldsworthy. (Here are the Yahoo and IMDB and Film Forum about-the-film pages, as well as the NYT review. Oh, and here are the play dates and locations around the U.S.) First, it's one of the most beautifully-filmed documentaries ever made, at least that I've ever seen. Second, Goldsworthy's nature sculptures are the epitome of less is more, simple yet deeply meaningful. Third, the movie gushes with creative power and it will make you think for days afterwards, much the way Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics did in print. Funny, if you've neither read that book nor seen this film it might appear at first glance that neither have anything important to say to interaction designers, visual designers, experience strategists, or information architects, but, in fact they have everything to say and will give you all kinds of ideas about constraints, balance, surprises, failure, materials, flow, light, space, and time --- all stuff that's relevant to architects, be they analog or digital.
In fact it's the constraints Goldsworthy encounters I found particularly interesting.
Early in the movie he talks about how he sought the open outdoors to do his art instead of the tight, enclosed, restricting cubicles of his art college. And yet, he's simply traded one set of constraints for another. Out in nature he intentionally makes nature and the passing of time his new constraints, building rock sculptures along the beach at low tide, racing to be done before the famous Nova Scotia tides come in. Or ice sculptures, racing to be done before the rays of the sun melt them away. It's all about knowing your constraints and working with them not against them. In a way he hands off his work to the constraints themselves, letting them change his work in ways he might never have thought of. Run and see this movie.
Right down the street from where I live, out in front of the La Jolla, er, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, is a fascinating rock cairn I pass by frequently; it turns out it's an Andy Goldsworthy piece (click on link to see picture).
May 13, 2003
Some Observations on the Just-Released MusicMatch Jukebox v8.0
by Brian L. DearSo last night I downloaded the brand-spanking new MUSICMATCH Jukebox version 8.0 to try it out on my Windows98 machine.
I must confess that I don't use MUSICMATCH as my main music library tool since my main computer is a Mac G4 PowerBook 17 running MacOS X (I've got iTunes 4.0 managing 50+ gigabytes of my music on that machine). But I originally ripped a lot of my CDs on my Windows machine and there's still a bunch of gigs on that machine's disk drive, and MUSICMATCH has been a handy tool for surfing through all those tunes. I had version 7.5 already installed, but with 8.0 now available, I figured I'd give the upgrade a try and see what was new.
What follows is a simple list of observations from this consumer installing MM8.0 and playing with it for a few hours this morning. Your experiences, i.e., your mileage, like your machine configuration and operating system, may vary.
1. Upgrading to 8.0
So the first thing I did was go to the MusicMatch website, which I noticed now announced the 8.0 browser on the pre-home (splash) page and homepage. So I downloaded the Basic version, and ran the installer app. Not surprisingly, the installer itself is under 1MB in size, but when you run it, it sucks down over 5MB of additional stuff during the install. I was disappointed I had to reboot the machine after the install was finished, but then, this is Windows...
Upon rebooting and launching MM8.0, I noticed a rather annoying "upsell" popup window:
Note how there is no affordance --- no button, no link, no text --- that provides the user a "cancel" or "no thanks, not interested" way out of this dialog. At least, I don't see one, do you? The only way out is to click the close-window X icon at the far right top of the window. Very aggressive marketing. But how many users, who indicated only minutes before at the MusicMatch website that they were interested in the BASIC version not the PLUS version (and what better way to indicate their interest than by downloading the BASIC version).... how many such users will find this popup window annoying and a negative first impression of the 8.0 product? How many novice-level users will give up once they discover they're essentially being forced to upgrade to PLUS? I'm left wondering if there isn't there a better way to upsell than this?
2. More Upsells
MusicMatch wants you to upgrade to the PLUS version really bad. I mean, REALLY bad. They're just as aggressive as RealNetworks in constantly reminding you that PLUS is where it's at, and by not using PLUS, we'll, let's not even go there. The first thing I noticed once the player actually fired up was the "Upgrade to MUSICMATCH Plus today" message, ticker-taping its way across the artist/track viewing window inside the player. In fact, whenever you're NOT playing a song in the basic version of MM8.0, the ticker-tape upsell message is showing in the Track/Artist view area.
Ironically, if you give up and say what the hell, ok, ok, I'll upgrade just to disable that damn ticker-tape message, and you CLICK on it, click right on the ticker-taping "Upgrade to MUSICMATCH Jukebox Plus today" message, it doesn't take you immediately to a place where you can UPGRADE! D'oh! Talk about a lost opportunity! I think this is a huge mistake. Here you have this message repeating over and over and over again, practically yelling at the user, demanding their attention, and when the user finally relents and clicks on the message, all that happens is the player opens up a web-like page showing information (complete with album art! there it is! see? MM does have the art for my albums -- so why doesn't it show it!?.... oh, wait, let's talk about that in #5 below) about a recently-listened-to album. And I have no idea how MM decides which album to highlight, that's another strangeness I noticed.
3. Stretch Marks
One of the first things I played with was clicking and dragging the "stretch" or "resize" affordance at the bottom right of MM8.0 to see what would happen. I noticed right away that while the common software design convention of this stretch affordance is that you can resize a window horizontally, vertically, or both (in other words, you can make the window size any combination of wider, taller, thinner, or shorter), with MM8.0, you can't really do that with this affordance. I think this breaks a pretty fundamental design rule. The reality is, MM8.0 only lets you widen the player to reveal playlists on the right. So there's a horizontal constraint to the resize/stretch action. In my book that means you can't use the diagonal-lines affordance icon because that implies diagonal stretching of both X and Y axes. Later on, we'll see that MM8.0 sometimes acknowledges this, by using a vertical-lines version of the affordance, which better indicates to this user that you can only widen the player.
4. Double-click Inconsistency When Playing Tracks
One weird inconsistency and annoyance in MM8.0 (and I'm pretty sure this was the case in 7.5 and earlier versions) is the way the app won't let you double-click on a track in the Music Library view to play it, IF a song is currently playing (if no song's playing, no problem, double-click works fine.) YET, if a song is already playing and you double-click on another track in the PLAYLIST view, MM has no objection and immediately starts playing the new track. D'oh!
Why I can't quickly surf through tracks within the library view, double-clicking away on tunes to hear the first few seconds, say, if I am trying to find that one song I'm in the mood to play right now, is beyond me.
Look at the player as shown above. If a song is playing, and I double-click on "The Enemy" track in the main Library view, it doesn't play. If I double-click on any track in the Playlist view at the upper-right, that double-clicked track immediately starts playing. Weird! I cannot see a reason why MM prevents me from double-clicking to my heart's content within the Library view. This is the way iTunes works, for instance.
The other thing that I find odd is the arrow button at the far left of the selected track while viewing tracks in the library. See the blow-up image to the left here to see what I'm talking about. Now, is that a PLAY icon, or a greater-than sign acting as an arrow, just to help guide the user's eye to the line they're on? Well, if you click that ">" thing, it turns out to be a play button after all. So you can single-click that play-button thingie to play a song, even while another's playing, but you can't double-click on the whole selection. Sigh. I don't get it. Don't make no sense to this user.
5. Album Art View: hooray, but...
Fantastic! I've advocated album-art-only browsing as an alternate view mode in music players for years, at MP3.com and elsewhere, and it's nice to see the feature existing within MusicMatch. Um, I wish it worked though! Maybe it's a teaser for a PLUS-only feature? All I ever see is MusicMatch placeholders instead of CD album covers. See below:
At first glance I find I'm not a big fan of the "balloon text" effect describing each album in the album art view mode. Probably because the slightest movement of the mouse causes new balloons to pop up describing the tracks in each album you mouse over. While that is proper behavior, the way it's implemented is very jumpy, jerky, and a bit annoying. I find I want to avoid album art view mode because of the balloon text. Which is a shame. Now if only I could see my album covers!!!
Also, there ought to be a way for the user to specify how many columns of album covers should be shown in the view area. Maybe I only want 4 across. MM seems to force a set number, and resizes the art images as you resize the app, keeping the column count the same. I don't like this. If you shrink the album covers down too small, the whole value of the album-cover-view browsing mode quickly diminishes, in my opinion.
6. Album Art View mode: Why does the app hate this mode so much?
There's something very odd about how MM8.0 constantly complains in terms of what it will allow you to do and what it won't allow you to do IF you happen to be in "Album Art View" mode. For example, have a sudden desire to view the app's preferences (known as Settings in MM) while the app is in album view mode? Forget it. MM complains saying, cryptically, "Unsupported in album art view."
It complains with the same message if you try to change the player's skin from the default "Zephyr" to "Phoenix". Why should messing with player skins be constrained by whether or not you're in Album Art View mode? Sounds like a flaw in the app's design to me.
One other thing: if you make sure the app is not in Album Art View mode, then go switch the app's Skin to "Phoenix", it switches fine, and sure enough, if you then switch the app back into "Album Art View" mode, you see that the Album Art View has a new skin as well. Which to me says, there's something really weird going on with this silly restriction about doing stuff while in Album Art View mode.
Oh, another thing.... check this out:
This is what happens if you have the app in "Phoenix" skin mode and you have the app in "Album Art View" mode (uh-oh!) and you click on the "tag" button at the bottom of your library view. See that "TAG" pencil icon, smack-dab in the center of the image above? That's what I clicked on. What did I see? An "Unsupported in album art view" error dialog box. Which if you do not close by clicking OK, and go back and click on the "Tag" icon again, you get another error dialog box. Keep doing it, and you too can create this interesting effect! Tell your friends!
7. Bug?
If you're in the Album Art View mode, and you open up the "Music Center" nav options in the left-hand side of the "Music Library" (don't get me started on the confusion I suffer from trying to figure out what "Center" is versus "Library") and then click on "Album Art" in the "View by" list, MM issues an error dialog box, saying "Exception in file DBMgr.cpp line 155 (3007)".
All I was testing was what would happen if I told MM to switch into Album Art View mode when it was already in Album Art View mode. I guess it doesn't like it when I try to do that. :-)
8. "Album"? What's That?
Eventually I was curious enough about how to load the real Album Art CD covers into MM that I fired up the app's Help feature. Up pops a typical Windows help window, and I select the Index tab and type in "album". Surprise, surprise. No such keyword. In the alphabetical list, it jumps from "Alarm settings" to "Always on top" with nothing "Album" in-between!
That's one I really don't understand. I mean, surely "album" is about as key a keyword as you can get in the help index for an application that's all about managing one's personal music library.
And considering how touchy the program is about "Album Art View" mode and when you can do stuff with that mode activated and when you can't, you'd think the help would explain why exactly the app is so touchy about that.
All I wanted to know was where I go within the app to force it to load the real abum covers for the CDs I've added to my library. I know MM has access to these images, because they pop up in sneaky places throughout the user experience (for example, when using the supertagging tag-lookup feature).
Perhaps the help section is just incomplete. I dunno. The company ought to look into this.
9. Browser Launching to What, Exactly...?
If you click on the big blue MUSICMATCH logo (the big one that one assumes is a place-holder for single album covers), it launches your browser. Now, where do you think it goes? Well, when it invokes my browser, it sends "%1" as the string to the browser. My netscape browser thinks what I want to do is search for the text string "1", yes, the number one, and so it shows results for such a search:
Now what's that all about? Interesting how VH1 is the first search result if you search for "1".... but, somehow I don't think this is what MM's designers had in mind when people click on this part of the player. ;-)
10. Blue Screen of Death
No review of a Windows application would be complete without a BSOD report. Sure enough, only after 30 minutes of fidgeting around with MM8.0, I got a BSOD. And I wasn't doing anything fancy, honest!
I had the the Music Library view mode set to "Albums", and I right-mouse-clicked on a track, any track, got that big popup menu, selected Super Tagging just out of curiosity, then clicked on "Lookup Tags...". Up came a dialog box with a progress indicator flashing momentarily --- I didn't have time to read the whole dialog box when all of a sudden, Blue Screen of Death, with the message "Fatal Exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0059C8D." Oh well.
So that's my first-hand quick-and-dirty report on tinkering with MusicMatch Jukebox 8.0. Comments? Questions? Feedback? Feel free to join in and participate below.