Apart from the fact that I believe this is a horrible, horrible idea (MS Office used to this to me with the menu items, worst idea ever) I believe there are more pressing matters to attend to when it comes to iTunes.
As far as I can tell Apple doesn't really care how people use iTunes to play and organize their media; it's, at best, secondary functionality at this point. I'm sure there are developers at Apple working on this aspect of iTunes but I think the primary focus for iTunes from here on in will be as a gateway into the iTunes store and device syncing.
Which is a shame, really, because there aren't a whole lot of alternatives out there for OS X.
It's an interesting idea, but this could optimize the wrong thing. You already rely on function x heavily, so why should this function be featured more prominently? You obviously have no trouble finding it. Only because someone doesn't click on a button for some time doesn't mean he won't in the future.
Why not suggest a playlist with songs you listen to the most instead of making the searchbox bigger? Why not suggest songs to listen to next instead of hiding the genius bar?
If anything I use frequently decided to implement this I don't think I would mind, so long as there was some key combination or option somewhere that would temporarily revert the UI back to it's initial state. Think that would be a must if I wanted to do something like follow a tutorial or explain to a friend how to do something over the phone. I don't know if it would be the best option for people who like everything to behave the same all the time though. And messing with peoples spatial understanding of menus and things can often annoy them. Maybe the process should be opt-in?
The idea of the growing search box is interesting, but what about one that kind of decays? It begins to shrink without usage until it reaches some point and then disappears. A good metaphor would be muscles, use them and they grow, don't lose them and they atrophy. I think non-IT oriented folk should be able to work out whats going on with enough visual cues. Especially if it becomes a common enough concept in software.
If someone's already using certain things frequently, they clearly know how to get to them; I'd personally be very irritated if the UI started changing to "fit my needs", which are already taken care of by the UI. Culling features out, however, is not a bad idea, but one has to wonder why you wouldn't focus on making the features easier to use and more useful, rather than dynamically culling them away.
Horrible, horrible idea. Imagine your car did the same. "Ooh, winter's back, need the rear window demister ... hey, where's the damn button gone?".
This is like those dancing menus Office used to have, except even worse, because it lowers the discoverability of advanced functions just as you're getting to the stage where you'd be more likely to use them.
This would work, if it didn't make things more difficult for less common tasks (many Linux distro's suffer this same problem, everything is great and productive when you are performing mainstream computing. However, cross the boundary slightly, and you'll find yourself in bash shell, which ruins all productivity benefits).
Sorry, but this isn't a good idea. iTunes actually wouldn't be half bad if they permitted addons, theming and official support for MTP/MSC. However, inconsistant UI's are a big no-no according to the lecturer who taught me GUI design, because users have to continue learning and cannot rely on elements existing where they expect them.
I assume when referring to productivity benefits you are actually referring to ease of learning? Command shells have huge productivity benefits if you know how to use them, their Achilles heel is that it takes quite a while to get used to and to the untrained user they are very daunting, whereas GUIs are more intuitive.
They have productivity benefits for some things true, but they don't expose or constrain operations very well (ie, I have seen "professionals" do stuff like "rm -rf ~/ folder" before accidentally) .
CLI's are generally only good at administration tasks (such as moving files around). In the vast majority of cases though, a good GUI would probably be more productive to work with.
But once again, that's my opinion. Until CLI's can expose tasks better, their benefits will be limited.
Just what I want starts out giving the user everything, but after a couple of weeks of training, the UI adapts to how the user interacts with it. ... "Didn’t I have a search field before?" The short answer is: yes. But who cares if you don’t use it anyway?
Microsoft Office used to have a UI that would do this. It was always the very first setting I'd change, disabling the feature. And Microsoft eventually discovered that it caused more confusion than it solved: people remembered seeing a command somewhere, but couldn't relocate it because it had been hidden.
Perhaps Microsoft's implementation could have been smarter, but I believe that they successfully demonstrated that this approach does not have merit.
I remember rummaging through the menus to find the menu item where one could do that to... To make matters worse, they had one "Options..." and one "Settings..." in the same menu, and I never remembered which one had those settings in it, so I pretty much always had to go through two dialog boxes before having the menus working properly again. Oh, the humanity!
So when my Mom learns to Google for iTunes tips, she will follow a tutorial and find that she's missing that UI element? And every tutorial step will include "if you don't see this, maybe you're using an old version, or maybe you need to hunt through the 'stuff that's been hidden' section and un-hide it?"
I prefer the Kathy Sierra idea that your program should make your users feel like "I am so smart", not "this program is so smart." Hiding stuff that you JUST KNOW you saw one time makes the user feel stupid.
This could work if Apple added a intelligent navigation agent that maybe asked you about where you wanted to go today. It could notice a brief pause in mouse movement (indicating that the user is trying to think of where to go next) and pop in and say, "Hi there human user, I'm L.P. Where do you want to go today?" The avatar of the agent would be a friendly looking record and would offer to reveal or hide various aspects of the user interface...
OK, OK. How about this: Whenever the user launches iTunes, a non-modal dialog box that looks like a comic book text box would appear from the system clock and display a message like "You have unused features on your iTunes(tm). Would you like to make things more confusing by hiding them?"
Without worrying about whether adaptive behavior like the article describes is a good idea (I don't think it is), I want to take issue with this opening paragraph:
"Are you the visual type of person that thrive in an environment of photos and illustrations? Or do you prefer listening to a book instead of reading it? Or do you want to touch everything to make sure you understand it?"
This is a watered-down restatement of the "learning styles" theory from educational psychology that, while almost never stated explicitly or coherently, is the view that different people have particular preferences for either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning and interaction, and that these learning style preferences are more or less stable over time. The usual implication is that if you determine what a person's "style" is, you can adapt whatever you're trying to teach them to incorporate their preferred medium, and they will learn better than if you used, say, a visual lesson with an auditory learner.
Despite its frequent repetition as fact in lay sources like this one, the learning styles theory has never been substantiated by scientific research. Assessments of learning styles show no predictive validity for individual differences in response to instructional methods intended to focus one style or another. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes, "After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that VAK, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits."
"Learning styles" is bunk, and casually repeating it as though it were an established mainstream theory is doing a disservice to science.
Of all my problems and concerns about iTunes. Not for a single moment have I ever thought "I wish that search box was a bit bigger" or "that darn cover flow icon is wasting too much space, I wish there was more blank grey space here".
Performance increases will save iTunes. Not this horrendous "smart UI" idea.
I hate being so harsh in a comment, and feel mean for writing it. But iTunes is one of the worst programs I use on a regular basis (I have an iPhone) and practically dread using it, to the point where I don't sync my phone as often as I'd like just to avoid the kludge. It makes my 2.4GHz MBP feel slow. Nothing else makes it feel slow. They desperately need to rewrite this, and I'm all for a radical UI change too - even if it was quick, I don't find it a pleasure to use. It feels distinctly un-apple.
When it comes to playing music and sync I still feel it works as expected, even though I wouldn't mind a speedier experience. Of course, I have been using it since version 3 sometime, so I'm used to it by now.
Where iTunes really feels inconsistent or non-intuitive for me is the video section, where playback definitely doesn't feel Apple-y (Why does it blank my primary screen when I do fullscreen video on my secondary, for instance?) I would much rather have the option to open video in Quicktime Player rather than having the sub-par experience within iTunes itself.
Even autohide taskbars are annoying, I'm using a 10px gnome panel now, and more command-line text search (built into nautilus). A problem with this approach is also if I go over to a friend's house that doesn't ever use the search box, I'll have to jump through hoops to even get to the search box, not a good idea. Hiding user interfaces and dynamically adopting them could be a good idea, but it makes the user think more, in an attempt to make them think less.
When helping others, uniformity is important.
If this site was like this, realizing that I read the whole comment thread before commenting and moving the comment box to the bottom of the page for me, it would be frustrating because I would sometimes scroll up and think I was logged out, etc.
(Big problem even when people accidentally remove UI elements from a program such as safari by dragging them off the toolbar.)
I don't think the real problem is with the idea of auto-adaptiveness but with the implementations and their faulty assumptions.
E.g. I have one computer that I bring out maybe once a month at parties. It should not think: "Okay, he hasn't used these playlists for a month, we can hide them." Some computers are also shared between many users (using the same account), so the adaptation logic would have to somehow realize that. And so on.
I think Apple is wise in not trying to do something like this until it can be done right. When it's done right, the user will never even realize it. Everything will just seem even smoother and simpler than before.
23 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 69.8 ms ] threadEven the iPad's reflow of icons when rotated is mildly disorienting, even though each group stays on its own page.
Ribbon bars and self-hiding menus do ok in focus groups for first time users because they haven't yet formed spatial memory around the task.
Blur your eyes so you can't read text and you still know where the Edit menu is. You know where it is, so that's where it should be.
Which is a shame, really, because there aren't a whole lot of alternatives out there for OS X.
Why not suggest a playlist with songs you listen to the most instead of making the searchbox bigger? Why not suggest songs to listen to next instead of hiding the genius bar?
The idea of the growing search box is interesting, but what about one that kind of decays? It begins to shrink without usage until it reaches some point and then disappears. A good metaphor would be muscles, use them and they grow, don't lose them and they atrophy. I think non-IT oriented folk should be able to work out whats going on with enough visual cues. Especially if it becomes a common enough concept in software.
Edit: clarified a few things
This is like those dancing menus Office used to have, except even worse, because it lowers the discoverability of advanced functions just as you're getting to the stage where you'd be more likely to use them.
Sorry, but this isn't a good idea. iTunes actually wouldn't be half bad if they permitted addons, theming and official support for MTP/MSC. However, inconsistant UI's are a big no-no according to the lecturer who taught me GUI design, because users have to continue learning and cannot rely on elements existing where they expect them.
Just my 2cents though.
CLI's are generally only good at administration tasks (such as moving files around). In the vast majority of cases though, a good GUI would probably be more productive to work with.
But once again, that's my opinion. Until CLI's can expose tasks better, their benefits will be limited.
Microsoft Office used to have a UI that would do this. It was always the very first setting I'd change, disabling the feature. And Microsoft eventually discovered that it caused more confusion than it solved: people remembered seeing a command somewhere, but couldn't relocate it because it had been hidden.
Perhaps Microsoft's implementation could have been smarter, but I believe that they successfully demonstrated that this approach does not have merit.
I prefer the Kathy Sierra idea that your program should make your users feel like "I am so smart", not "this program is so smart." Hiding stuff that you JUST KNOW you saw one time makes the user feel stupid.
This kind of thing is a kludge for an unfocussed, overly-featured app. Simple apps that only do what you want are much better. Kind of like iPods...
"Are you the visual type of person that thrive in an environment of photos and illustrations? Or do you prefer listening to a book instead of reading it? Or do you want to touch everything to make sure you understand it?"
This is a watered-down restatement of the "learning styles" theory from educational psychology that, while almost never stated explicitly or coherently, is the view that different people have particular preferences for either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning and interaction, and that these learning style preferences are more or less stable over time. The usual implication is that if you determine what a person's "style" is, you can adapt whatever you're trying to teach them to incorporate their preferred medium, and they will learn better than if you used, say, a visual lesson with an auditory learner.
Despite its frequent repetition as fact in lay sources like this one, the learning styles theory has never been substantiated by scientific research. Assessments of learning styles show no predictive validity for individual differences in response to instructional methods intended to focus one style or another. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes, "After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that VAK, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits."
"Learning styles" is bunk, and casually repeating it as though it were an established mainstream theory is doing a disservice to science.
[End of slightly off-topic rant]
> "I believe that it’s a healthy way of loosing control."
Got a problem with incontinence? Keep it to yourself.
Performance increases will save iTunes. Not this horrendous "smart UI" idea.
I hate being so harsh in a comment, and feel mean for writing it. But iTunes is one of the worst programs I use on a regular basis (I have an iPhone) and practically dread using it, to the point where I don't sync my phone as often as I'd like just to avoid the kludge. It makes my 2.4GHz MBP feel slow. Nothing else makes it feel slow. They desperately need to rewrite this, and I'm all for a radical UI change too - even if it was quick, I don't find it a pleasure to use. It feels distinctly un-apple.
Where iTunes really feels inconsistent or non-intuitive for me is the video section, where playback definitely doesn't feel Apple-y (Why does it blank my primary screen when I do fullscreen video on my secondary, for instance?) I would much rather have the option to open video in Quicktime Player rather than having the sub-par experience within iTunes itself.
If this site was like this, realizing that I read the whole comment thread before commenting and moving the comment box to the bottom of the page for me, it would be frustrating because I would sometimes scroll up and think I was logged out, etc. (Big problem even when people accidentally remove UI elements from a program such as safari by dragging them off the toolbar.)
E.g. I have one computer that I bring out maybe once a month at parties. It should not think: "Okay, he hasn't used these playlists for a month, we can hide them." Some computers are also shared between many users (using the same account), so the adaptation logic would have to somehow realize that. And so on.
I think Apple is wise in not trying to do something like this until it can be done right. When it's done right, the user will never even realize it. Everything will just seem even smoother and simpler than before.