On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 22:39 -0800, Kirk Bridger wrote: > Thanks Andy, great points. > > I think we have a basic question here that nobody is really asking: > are users going to want to adjust volume per app? Yes, I know some of > us may, but would users really use it?
It is a good question to ask, but answering it is a bit subtle. The problem is that until recently, no mainstream OS has had the sound system powerful enough to manage the volume for individual applications. As a result, people have been trained to think that volume settings must be done the way they are done now. The other thing is that many of our applications already have a volume slider, but I haven't seen anyone proposing, or even considering removing them. Doing things the way I've described would mean that those applications with their own volume slider could be made consistent with each other (since they would all have the exact same volume controls). So from that perspective, it isn't really changing the existing functionality. > > I'd be curious about Vista's experience with it - Vista can do this, > can't it? I've never used it, but this: http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Windows-Vista-Volume-Mixer-41882.shtml Has a picture of their mixer. I'm not sure what happens when you run an application twice (say two movie players). > > I think right now pulse audio lets me do it, and I like the idea, but > man is it a lot of work to make adjustments to all those volume > sliders. it's much easier to just stick with what is set right now > and adjust the dial on my speakers, seriously. I used to use the dial on my speakers, so I know exactly where you are coming from. My current method of working is to only adjust the master volume, by putting my mouse over its icon and using the wheel. This is really convenient and responsive. If I have music playing and I'm watching something on youtube, I will pause the music player - most of the time this is not what I actually wanted to do, as I typically want to turn down the volume of either the video or the music. The best thing for my case would be to have an icon in the title bar of the application that I could just mouse-wheel over to adjust things. > That's not to say we shouldn't give them the ability to tweak of > course, nor does it mean there couldn't be some presets, but this all > feels somewhat like we're building a solution to a problem that nobody > really is interested in solving. I'm all for usability tests (though I suck at designing them). But if someone can design a test that doesn't suffer from the problems I talked about before, then that would be very interesting. I'm just nervous that we'll end up doing a test in such a way that we never get anything new, because people don't even realise that things are possible. Andy _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
