------------------------------------------------------------------------ A poll associated with this post was created, to vote and see the results, please visit http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31443 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: How do you control the Slimserver? - Stock Handheld Remote - 3rd Party Remote (Harmony, Nokia, PDA, &c) - Web Interface - 3rd Party Computer Interface (Moose, JRMC, &c) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The remote is OK, although only being able to see a limited number of entries is a pain when doing a search, being ably to rapidly pick from a list is easier if you can see all of the list, or at least more of it than one entry - you don't know if your search was correct otherwise. Becuase it is a "slim" device, response time can make stepping through lists irrititating, it's not that it's slow, it's that it's uneven and therefore hard to predict when to stop clicking. I wish the SB would cache more so that scrolling happened at a fixed rate instead of going back to the server each time. The web interface is good for set-up, but bad for music selection. There are just too many clicks to play some music and the affordance is poor - it really isn't obvious what you do to play all the tracks from an album for example. Does clicking the first song do it, or do I click the album name? In any case all the niggles are dwarfed by the slow update. It's very similar to the setup screen for my ADSL router, but I only do that very occasionally. Having that same response time and clunky interface is really poor for a consumer music player. I want snappy and simple, no tiny buttons, but big obviopus ones. No extraneous data and information, just the basics. Just because you can display all the options on one page, that doesn't mean you should. A great example is the default start page. I have two panels, one labeled "home", the other the name of my music player. Everything I could possibly want to do is on those two panels, but why not just the common operations? Why all the clutter - and it is clutter. Just how do I play a album from the start page? It's what I immediately want to do, but I have to work out that I first have to search or browse to find the music first, rather than seeing a list of music straightaway that lets me click straightaway on a track and play it. Even when I find a track I have to know to hover over a tiny symbol to find out what it does - and what's a playlist if I'm joe user? No obvious method on how to create and manage one in the UI. When I do click on browse, there's too many albums listed on each page and not enough room for obvious functionality. Sure I can change that, but the defaults are too, too confusing. Of course people will say "once you get used to it it's really powerful" and "it's for technically minded people" , but that really is an cop-out for not thinking about use case in the design and carrying out usability testing and high quality UI design work. It's great that it exists, but as a consumer product it is Byzantine in operation, far too complex and unresponsive. OK, rant over! -- CardinalFang ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CardinalFang's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=962 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31443 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
