Gallery User Experiences
The other day I got an email pointing me to CoverFlow, CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection:
The person emailed wondering if we’d adopted something similar in the future. While it’s impossible to rule out that we’d never do something similar I do have a bit of experience with similar UI. For instance, take a look at the queue management UI that I worked on for a demo of an Avalon Netflix application (click through for full size):
Now if you notice the black band has a queue control. It’s hard to illustrate this in a screenshot but if you mouse over the queue covers they expand out and show you the one you’re currently over. It’s almost identical to CoverFlow in feel. Now from that control you can select a movie and get the movie details. Alternatively you can view your queue full screen:
Again you can mouse over covers and they rotate into the foreground as you mouse over them.
We nicknamed this queue control the ‘accordion’ view. While I think it’s got some good ‘wow’ factor I don’t think it’s very usable. Why?
- It doesn’t expose enough information – I want to be able to see more than one full cover art at a time. For me this is a deal breaker. I need to see an album in the context of my collection.
- It’s not scalable – I feel this UI widget works for a small amount of albums or movies, but scale it up to 1000 or 10000 items and it will be very unweldly. Our biggest fear with the Netflix accordion widget was that for the demo it looked cool for 20 movies but for any more (it would have to support the max number of movies you can have in your queue) it just wouldn’t work.
For comparison here is Media Center’s default album view in Vista:
(Disclaimer: This screenshot is from the December CTP using my personal music collection and a lot can change between now and launch in terms of what you see here).
We’re showing album covers, so it has lots of visual wow, when you scroll through the album in focus is pulled out and metadata about it is displayed below, if we don’t have cover art we embed it in the cover art tile, and lots of covers are visible on the screen enabling you to see it in the context of your larger collection.
My biggest concern with our approach is that since we no longer show the titles under the albums you need to be very familiar with your cover art in order to know where you are and find what you’re looking for. For me a more useful view is going to be our albums by artist view:
Since I think of my collection artist first and then album.
For another comparison check out an example of how movie galleries will look:
I wish I had some screenshots of how other Media Center like apps handle galleries but don’t. Though here are some two foot examples:
What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer?
Comments(10)
Hey Matt.
I must say that I dont prefer the new looks of Vista. If you have loads of albums it doesnt look good. I Denmark we have lots of Danish artists and their albums tend not to show up because of Media Player cant find the album art. So if you as a customer decides not to scan or look through the internet for album art you get loads of blank squares. I must admit that it might be worth a try before I can comment on it 100%.
I think that the Netflix looks cool(the second GUI) but I also agree that it must be hard to handle 100’s of albums.
Jeppe
I usually want to be able to switch between views. I’m not very familiar with my cover art, so a button that toggles between say List view and Cover art view would be great.
Ok – this answer is going to be shorter than I have hoped – please change your links on the images to be “_blank”, I lost a long reply because I forgot to open them in a new window.
I must say that both the ColorFlow and the Netflix UI’s does look ‘wow’, and I can’t tell quite how the UI on the Netflix part would be to work with, but I am pretty sure that the ColorFlow UI would be pretty useless, and I tend to say the same with the Vista Music UI.
I think there is a clear difference here between music covers and movie covers:
- Music covers are often designed without a large readable title, they are easy to identify when you know what to get in the stores, but I know that I could not clearly destinquish (bad spelling, sorry, english is not main language) between mine. I might know some, but not all. With this in mind, I find the CoverFlow and Vista way of doing this pretty problematic.
- Movie covers are different, they are often designed based on a movie poster, and almost always has a large title that you can read from a distance, this means that displaying movie covers without any additional information below is very likely to function well.
I think the Netflix and ColorFlow looks awesome, and the Vista UI also looks nice, but I find that usability always has to come first, and I may have a feeling that ‘wow’ is first priority here, and usability is second, which I think is wrong.
Sure, it’s very hard decitions to make, as people choose products based on the ‘wow’ effect, but when it comes to what will be used in the homes of most people, it all comes down to the ‘waf’ effect, and I know that in my home, none of these UI’s will have much ‘waf’.
So, what I am trying to say is that Media Center 2005’s way of displaying music does not look as nice as the one in December CTP, but generally it works quite well, everything can be improved, but I think that the Vista way is a step back usability wise, while it’s a step forward ‘wow’ wise. The Media Center team has not been able to find the right combination here, sorry.
That said, I think you are doing a great job on these things, but now that you asked ;-)
Regards,
Brian Binnerup
Not showing the titles is going to be a problem for me. I don’t buy albums so album art is a novelty item for me. I buy & download songs.
I don’t have a siggestion for you, but I do now that browsing by anonymous album covers is going to be a chore.
I guess that’s purpose of alternate views such as “by artist” “by song title” etc..
Give me an option for a good old fashioned text list and I’ll be happy! (And can I have one of those in My Videos too please – what is it with you guys and forcing us into visual systems when we can read? :) )
The album art oriented view is very 20th century in this world of rips and downloads.
Stuff I’ve bought online I don’t know what the album art looks like.
And it’s a nightmare if you have a substantial number of older, no longer available, compilation ablums. Short of getting the scanner out, there’s no way of getting the album art for them.
But if you’ve made the My Music section work at a usable speed if you have more than the half dozen albums that MCE is always demoed with I’ll settle for that!
Thanks for the feedback everyone, there is still a lot of time between now and ship, who knows what we’ll change.
And just to be clear a ‘list view’ of just text and no cover art is still available. I just don’t have a screenshot handy of it since I’m no longer running the December CTP.
The netflix looks funky but yeah I can see how that would become unweildy very quickly.
Im not sure about the music gallery. Get rid of the sideways writing … that will p1ss people off very quickly. I think it should be Bold Artist, Bold Album name underneath, and then other track and time below that unbold.
I do like the look of the new Movie gallery (I am dubious where the movie info will come from though, and how flexable it is). It would be really cool if you could scroll left and right but also zoom in and out so if you had a massive swag of movies you could fit more in to the screen. ie instead of 2 covers high it would change to 4 high depending on zooming out and in. But again that becomes a usability issue when the covers shuffle around.
Unless … hmmm yeah there are ways around that even.
Anyway I am rambling. I think its time to get that December CTP loaded on the second hard drive.
The movie info comes from AMG just like it does in Media Center 2005.
I prefer the spartan WMP10/iTunes look – the richest music experience is the one that lets me find the song in my head the fastest. I actually found this page because I’ve been looking for a way to disable cover art completely in MCE2005 – that “album art loading” 20-second lag when I click on “My Music” is infuriating! How is performance, with and without cover art? Can we set how the music is sorted/displayed on startup (or will we again have to watch unwanted cover art load)? I’m otherwise so happy with MCE that it’s just a shame that the music side is so slow.
Eric, we’ll be resolving the music performance issues with Vista.