Raising the (scroll) bar...

 

The scroll bar on the iTunes website with labels in the "shaft" for "aimed" scrolling.

Awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And while on the subject of scroll bars, I have never really like the way the control renders and behaves.

1. The scroll bar is window centric and not document centric. For e.g., clicking the down button or pulling the elevator down, scrolls the document up while the action is called scrolling down.  Dyslexic.

2. Unidirectional arrow buttons on either ends of the scrollbars. So while scrolling down, if you miss the spot on the document you were looking for, you have to navigate all the way up the screen to scroll back up. I wish both ends of the scroll bars had arrow pointing up and down.

BTW, notice the scroll bar in Word 2007 (figure to the right). The page up and page down controls are (correctly) bunched together, and not laid out on the periphery of the control for symmetry

 

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Implicit rating

Unwittingly, we as a user are rating media content everytime we

- increase volume of the iPod as a favourite song comes along

- consistently skip a song

- leave a clip half way on youtube (to go watch another one)

- navigate away from a page under 5 seconds especially off a search result

Is it being captured and used ?

Should it not be?

Apple form factor evolution

Beautiful graphic which shows the evolution of the Apple from factor from Apple I to the iPhone over 30 years from 1976 through 2007. This goes to show the improvements in usability and user experience in Apple products.

An apple a day ...

Isn't the iPod Ux over-rated ?

iTunes bitten by the usability bug

Yes, even the gods of usability goof up sometimes...and how!!!

I recently bought a very expensive 80GB iPod. Intention being to put in lots of music videos. Also bought a cable to be able to see them on my TV. All well and good..they thought of neat accessories and was quite amazed by the fact that the video output was through the headphone socket!!!

Now the problem is how music videos are treated. In iTunes, they are a playlist.Which means if I want to delete one, I have to go to the huge list of files in music (I have about 8000 of them), sort them by type of file, and then delete it. However, movies and tv shows are not a playlist and you can manage that list directly from the list.


Funny since when you add a video, the types are music video, movie, and tv show. So why the step motherly treatment to music videos..I mean the iPod is supposed to be about music right?

In my iPod, they are treated a little differently. They come under the videos menu, which is nice. But they are also treated as songs. Which means they appear in the top 25 playlist in the songs menu!!!

This is OK, except that if you are playing a playlist, a video takes longer to load and play, creating a unnecessary pause.

I guess we should start making standard usability practices for such PC dependent devices. There should be uniformity in how each entity is treated across the device and the PC. And of course it has to be usable. Don Norman listening?