Bugzilla – Bug 6555
'Play' button has inconsistent behavior
Last modified: 2009-05-06 07:59:45 UTC
After experimenting with the UI for a while, I am fairly convinced that our use of the Play and Select buttons is just not quite right. There are almost no situations where the Play and Select buttons should do different things. An example is when you've got a Now Playing list of songs, and you're scrolling through the menu options. Most users will intuitively hit the Play button to select menu items (such as Music Services, Settings, Extras, etc). Even more of an issue is once you're down in a menu of Rhapsody channels and you hit play .. 95% of the time it just starts up your playlist again. The other 5% of the time, it seems to fail all together. I've asked my entire family (father, sisters, wife) to experiment with the Jive remote, and the constant feedback I've gotten is that the use of these buttons is confusing, and they loose interest in the product almost immediately. I strongly suggest we look closely at the iPod interface, and mimic its use of these buttons as closely as possible. Ultimately, it's not logical that 'Play' will start your 'paused' playlist when you're buried deep in the menu system.
Dean to comment.
Consider the case when you are browsing through Genre -> Artist -> Album -> Song. At each level the play and go buttons have different behavior: Genre- Play: Play all the songs for that genre, Go: view artists for that genre Artist - Play: Play all the songs for that artist, Go: view albums for that artist Album - Play: Play all the songs in that album, Go: View the songs in that album Song - Play: Play that song, Go: View the details for that song. Now with Jive we've added a Play All item at many levels, making the Play button unnecessary in many cases (Press Go to go in and then Go again to trigger Play All). In that case the Play button really is a shortcut. I'm describing what it does right now, but I'm not opposed to changing it to something more intuitive. But we probably shouldn't do that until after we ship 7.0. Let's discuss in this bug and review for 7.1.
Just to add another link in the chain: in bug 6426, the comment is to have Play act as Go whenever Play has no specific function.
I agree with Matt about this issue, everyone I've tested Jive with gets really frustrated with this behavior. My suggestion for our next release is to have the center button act as "play" when a song is selected, and to go to the info screen we use a long press (1 - 1.5 seconds)
will not be addressed in 7.1. Untargetting the bug, Dean to target.
When you go into a track the default item is Play This Song. People have too much trouble doing press-and-hold (or rather, do it accidentally). Let's discuss a general solution offline.