Bugzilla – Bug 7944
pressing "home" should always go home
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:14:36 UTC
Pressing the "home" button should predictably go to the "home" menu -- the toggle between "now playing" screen and "home" menu is very confusing, especially in the case where a user presses home while the screen-saver is displaying and they are taken to the now playing screen (since the user didn't know they were ALREADY on the "home" screen). Observed users avoiding the "home" button because of this seemingly unpredictable behavior and saying they were 'lost' when really they were just confused about the dual behavior of the "home" button. Proposed solution is home button always goes to the "home menu" with the first item in the "home" selected (such that "home" keypress + center button keypress = Now Playing) since "home" button keypress indicates the user wishes to abandon the current navigation path and return to the home menu to begin a new navigation path. Ideally the behavior of the home button could be a user-selectable option to use the home button to "Always return to Home" (default) or "Toggle between Now Playing and Home".
I think that this problem can be simplified if the now playing screen saver really was exactly the same state as navigating to the now playing screen. Pressing the knob button should always go from there to the active playlist. (And probably should to that even if the active playlist contains only one entry!). Home should, IMHO, return you to where you where before the screen save engaged, and then on the second press take you home, not to now playing. The real problem being reported, I think, is that since the now playing screen saver isn't really now playing, you have to navigate from it to the real now playing, and there is no single key sequence that does that regardless of where you are.
Great point about wakeup from screen saver -- arguably any navigational keypress event should initially just remove the screen saver and show whatever screen you were on so you don't annoyingly get unintetionally navigated away from what you were doing when you simply wanted to clea the screen saver -- I'll file an additional bug about this if one doesn't already exist. The problem being reported is that users expect "home" to always go "home" -- which it does (good), with the ONE exception of when you are already on home (bad). This single exception may seem simple, but observed users get confused about where "home" is and what "home" actually means because sometimes they end up on "Now Playing" and sometimes they end up on "Home". An allegorical example would be if "Back" had a secondary behavior if you are already on the bottom level menu. To the user, "Back" always means "go back up a menu level", so an alternate behavior on the root menu would indicate to the user that they were not on the root menu when they indeed were. Similarly, the secondary behavior of the "Home" button indicates they were not "Home" when they indeed were.
My most common sequence is: Navigate in my music library, choose an album, and play it. Note that at that point I'm in a place I probably don't need to get back to, although I might want to get close. A bit later, i want to manipulate the now playing state (active playlist) in some way - skip around, etc. By then the screen saver now playing is active. And I really want it to be as if I'd manually navigated to now playing already. so then how to get back? The back button takes you back to where you were before the screen saver - that works today. home takes you home as Mathew proposes.
Worth noting that since screen saver is user configurable, some won't have "Now Playing" displayed as their screen saver.
I didn't consider that and I agree its an issue. The root cause is that the controller doesn't have a dedicated now playing button, and not enough buttons to have one. So, IMHO, you need the screen saver to save the situation. What if its a different screen saver? One though is that they all put you into the now playing state - no matter what they display - in the sense that the button actions i propose are the same no matter what the screen saver shows. And if you have none its up to you to navigate to where you want to be. I see no problem with the current behavior that has pressing home when already home taking you to now playing.
This is a core behavior in our UI now. It'll need a ruling from Dean. Ben and Richard note there is a bug where the now playing screensaver is on top of the now playing screen can be a very confusing experience which is related to this issue.
Let's leave the Home button behavior as it is: Pressing HOME takes you Home. If you are already home, pressing HOME again takes you to Now Playing. A secondary question is whether upon waking from the Now Playing screensaver you jump back to where you were or you are left on the Now Playing screen. This is the classic "Jump Back On Wake" behavior, which is treated like a separate screensaver on SB3 and Transporter interfaces. I propose that we add this option to the Controller setting and leave the default as it is on SB3/Transporter. (Please feel free to file a bug for this enhancement.) The third question is what happens if you press BACK or LEFT when on the Home screen. Right now it doesn't do anything and folks have been pretty happy with it. Some other devices (like my Garmin GPS) take you to the equivalent of Now Playing and flip you back and forth between Home and Now Playing. I initially decided against this behavior because of "Fitts Law" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts'_law to let the user hit the LEFT/BACK key repeatedly and always end up at home. This is a little different than the HOME button, which isn't pressed repeatedly to navigate further. HOME is a hyper-jump button taking you to a known place from a known place quickly. The suggestion that pressing HOME again could take you back to where you were before you hit it the first time would be great if it were useful to go Home to check something briefly, then back. But our Home menu doesn't do anything useful while you are there. Now Playing is a better use of the second press on HOME.