When many tracks have names that begin with the same string, you would need to wait until the title scrolls enough to the right to tell which one you want, but this UI goes away if you do not interact with it for 15 seconds (No, this problem is not about the screensaver kicking in) and goes back to the player UI, without giving you a chance to read enough of the title.
This is especially problematic when you are listening to the audio edition of The Economist (audiobook). Their titles in the UI often look like this:
12 United States - Th…
13 United States - Inf…
14 United States - C…
15 United States - Ba…
You can up/down the wheel to keep the UI active, but every time you move the focus that way, the title start scrolling from the very beginning, and you would never see the later part of the title strings.
There are a few possible UI improvement ideas.
- Allow use of smaller font in the list, so that more text can horizontally fit on a line.
- There is no reason to time out this UI at 15 seconds. If the user wants to view the list of songs, episodes and titles, let him keep viewing it.
- Because you can tell where the focus is from the background of the entry in the list, there is no reason to scroll only the one that the focus is on. All tracks with long titles can be scrolled regardless of which track the focus is currently on.
- The scrolling can be sped up to when skipping the common substring (this would be harder to code).
Message Edited by clipuser on 12-14-2008 02:53 PM
