Why did you change MCE!?
There have been recurring questions about our re-design on the beta newsgroups. And yes, I know a lot of users liked our old Start Menu model which consisted of a homepage containing links to experience specific homepages. However, our homepages were bursting at the seams. For many homepages, we could no longer add any more buttons on the left hand side. For many locales (i.e. Germany) the string containers on those pages weren’t large enough to support the longer text. For many OEMs and third party add-ons they did not like how far away their applications were from Media Center’s core experiences. And so we sought to re-design the Start Menu to address some of those concerns.
To respond to one of the threads I pinged one of our lead designers to get his thoughts on our redesign. This is what he wrote:
There are three key decisions we made in Vista that dramatically change the
way MCE 2005 worked from the start (pardon the pun).
- Content is king - We want to get you to your content quickly and leave
you in your content. This means less navigating around multiple home pages
and menus to get you to what you want. It requires more work on the user’s
part to find the right link at first but the end result is greater control
in the long term.- Context is king - To reduce the amount of navigation up and down the UI
hierarchy the Start menu is now context sensitive. The Beta version doesn’t
reflect this yet but future versions will allow the Start menu to be
“sticky” thus allowing you the ability to transverse the current experience
easily and more efficiently within your current experience.- Vista is more scalable - The start menu and galleries accommodate partner
integration and expansion better than MCE 2005. We can expose the user to
richer content in context of your experience.Over time Vista MCE will grow and accommodate user needs better.
And I agree with many of you that the new design isn’t as simple as the old design but the more you use it the more I think you’ll find that as our designer points out above, it is much more powerful. Now are we making the right trade off between simplicity and powerfulness? I think we are but we don’t base decisions like that by just listening to our designers, program managers and developers (someone on the newsgroup asked if our product was designed solely by develoeprs). We also have a large usability team who validates the decisions we as a group make on real end users (most of whom have never used MCE before) to ensure that we are indeed making forward progress.
In the end I hope you will all come around to liking the changes if you don’t already. If you don’t, well, there’s always MCE 2005 :).
Working with usability questions everyday I’ve noticed that it’s easy for us designers to get locked in to two different ways of thinking. The old way and the new way.
One problem is that human beings are keen on their old habits and the more we are exposed to a way of doing things it’s going to get tougher to get us to learn to do it another way. Even though the new way is faster, more efficient etc. However, once we’ve gotten used to the new way, we’ll prefer that and all is well. HOWEVER, usability engineers are all too aware of this. This sets up a trap where you may ignore important comments from old users because you know most of them will get used to the new system you’ve developed eventually.
This leaves us with two ways of doing things. The old way, and the new way. But nobody is looking for secret option number three: the best way. Many times usability designers can get stuck in false notitions that something has to be done a certain way because of the new requirements. However, I constantly find myself discovering that artificial requirements have grown during the development process. Often these issues can be corrected or improved by changing small design elements but retaining most of the overall system. Because it turns out, what the old users was missing wasn’t acctually something that was contrary to the new system but rather minor elements which helps them navigate.
The problem is that users aren’t usability experts. They don’t know themselves what they are missing. They just know they liked the old way of doing things. So, I suggest you try to examine what exactly it is that old users are missing in the context of the new system. I plan on doing a bigger usability analysis on the Vista Media Center design in a few months.
Hi Matt,
I am not sure this is the best place to post this query but here goes…
I have always had a problem with Windows Media Player not handling multi-disc albums correctly. The ID3tag Frame for this is PARTINSET or DISCNMBER I believe. There is no way to add this frame to the columns in Windows Media Player yet if you open an MP3 in the Advanced Tag Editor you will see a “Set:” box there displaying the PARINSET info eg. “1/3″ indicating the file is from disc one of three.
This problem of course propogates accross to MCE2005 where if I play a two disc album it will play the first track on disc one then the first track on disc two then the second track on disc one and so on. Very annoying.
I have been running Windows Vista for a little while now and two of the Betas i trialed before Beta 2 fixed this problem by displaying each disc as a seperate album, so a three CD album would show up three times in Vista Media Centre, the same cover art image for each disc. You have no idea how happy i was about this, finally i could abandon iTunes.
I recently installed Vista Beta 2 and this problem is back again, each album shows up once in Media Centre regarless of how many CDs it has.
Do you know if this issue is going to be addressed in some way in Vista Media Centre or Media Player 11? Perhaps i am the only one having this problem as i haven’t seen it mentioned in any forums.
Awesome blog by the way, one of the few i read religiously.
Regards
Dan
Ahhhh… someone else with the same problem as me, yes multidisc albums are a pain, eg: I have several of the harry potter audio books on CD and have ripped them to my library, these have 10 - 12 or more discs each.
In iTunes all was well, however in WMP 11 and Vista MCE they are unplayable due to the fact the disc number is not honored by the software and so as the previous poster says you get track1 disc1, then track1 disc2 etc etc…
Most frustrating….
…. over a year later and media player still screws with my multi-disc collections. Why do I waste my time with this?