Just A Summary : Usability testing (throws) rocks

Comment on Usability testing (throws) rocks by rog

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:56:10 -0500

hi piers,

having had a very quick play with the interface myself before reading the article above, i think my main reaction is that it’s unconventional (and therefore unintuitive) to have two windows communicating with each other. if a window pops up when you click on a song, then i expect that window to be synonymous with the playing of that song, and therefore the controls should be in that window, and i expect the song to stop playing when i close the window.

on the other hand, why have another window at all? what’s wrong with the myspace style of having the player in the main window. if you want to provide a sexy UI that won’t fit nicely in a small space, you could always provide a “pop-out” icon, like gmail does for its compose box, that would continue playing the same song inside the sexy UI inside a new window.

maybe this isn’t technically possible though?

cheers, rog.

Comment on Usability testing (throws) rocks by rog

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:57:32 -0500

by the way, i totally agree with the main thrust of your comment though!

Comment on Usability testing (throws) rocks by Piers Cawley

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:07:43 -0500

The trouble with the Myspace approach is that it loses its marbles as you go from page to page. We tried to fix that by having a ‘speakerbox’ child window, but it caused confusion when there was nothing in it, and it appears to be causing confusion now that there is something in it. It seems it wasn’t as good an idea as we thought.

If we were determined to keep the player in the main window, we could experiment with something like the gmail chat interface, but that definitely smacks of spitting into the wind.

Comment on Usability testing (throws) rocks by Phillip Meredith

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:21:18 -0500

It might be interesting to see if testing the site with the actual target demographic yields different results. Given that usertesting.com tends to be 40 year old house wife’s who life in Texas.