Rethinking iTunes
  iTunes: a brilliant interface to your music or an increasingly clumsy and limiting one?
 

 

iTunes does some things brilliantly - smart playlists are a significant innovation, as is the Music Store and the various shuffle functions. It is noted that many iTunes users are very satisfied with iTunes in its present form and are happy to look to other online sources of information for details of what they are listening to. Other functions are much less impressive, particularly the handling of larger music collections- at this point, Much praise has been given to the ability of iTunes to reorder existing hierarchies based around the album format. While useful for many, this focus does ignore the significant majority who want to listen to particular albums.

The context of this critique relates to the perception of an increasing focus upon the mp3 player as primary source and controller of audio playback in light of advances made in wireless technology (e.g. AirTunes), ever-increasing hard-drive space, the popularity of the iTunes Music Store and the growth in the market for laptops outside of the corporate sector.

icon image of iTunes interface Click for full size version

Problems

The overall impression of the above window is that it is ill-ordered and does not make efficient use of available screen real-estate, specifically:

source icon The Source Column

  • The icons for external functions such as iTMS, Radio, etc. are poorly signposted and recall the visual cues of pre XP Windows;
  • The user is forced to read textual descriptions: there is no visual differentiation between individual playlists. This is much less intuitive than the real-world experience of scanning the spines of cd jewel-cases with their variety of colour, typography and other cues;
  • Everything in the Source column, apart from the external functionality is listed in alphabetical order, there is no facility to reorder the contents into more intuitive clusters without resorting to clumsy tricks such as putting a '/___' before group names to differentiate them from smart playlists (see above screenshot);
  • The Source column occupies less than a tenth of the window. It may be expanded towards the right but this does nothing to increase its usefulness.

artwork icon The Album Artwork Window

  • The addition of the Artwork window (I think in version 3 of the application) limits the amount of information visible in the Source column and forces the user to do more scrolling. There is much discussion about scrolling, but in web design it's generally discouraged: any information not immediately visible is much more likely to be ignored;
  • If there is no Artwork available, the 'drag album artwork here' is very unattractive;
  • The impression is that the Artwork window is an afterthought.

Artist icon The Artist Window

  • In the above screenshot example the Artist window is fairly well populated, but if one of the individual group names, rather than a smart playlist is selected the Artist window becomes almost redundant and wastes a lot of screen space. The vertical divider between the Artist window and the Album window cannot be moved, it allocates the two columns 50% each.

Album icon The Album Window

  • Same problems as detailed for the Artist window
  • As with the Source window it's not possible to arrange albums in anything other than alphabetical order without workarounds. In the example displayed here, albums are ordered by year of release by the workaround of adding the year to the Album Title - if two albums are released in the same year, then it's a case of

Track icon The Track Details Window

  • The Track Details window - which isn't actually given a name in the interface unlike its colleagues - is the least satisfying in terms of function. Displaying detailed information such as who performed what is highly problematic. If available, that information has to be added in the Comments box of each MP3. Making this visible in the interface by enabling the Comments column results in the repetition of that information for each track. Not only that, but the space available is extremely limited so that the visible information is virtually unusable;
  • To avoid scrolling longer lists in the Artist or Album window the Track Details window has to be pushed right down.

Summary

What began as an attractive, perhaps even innovative interface is now suffering under the weight of additional functionality which has been added piecemeal. What's needed is a thorough rethinking of the requirements of contemporary users within the context of changing conditions referred to above in the introduction. The interface has become visually clumsy and unwieldy to use with the result that the user wishing to find a particular album by a particular artist has to do a lot of scrolling or mouse clicks and tabbing. Many of the solutions to these issues may be found within the wider Apple OS X interface as detailed below.