Entries tagged with user interface

Miriam and I were talking about my annoyance and frustration with new versions of various software interfaces yesterday, and that might be a post in itself. But the conversation reminded me of my experiences trying other media players since Winamp 2.x and how annoying or unhelpful I found them. Winamp 2.71 did exactly what I wanted and very little else, so I just stuck with it.

Since Winamp 2.x does not play FLAC files, and I'm tired of opening up VLC player every time I want to play the files from my ripped CD collection, and a search online for a working FLAC plugin for Winamp was unsuccessful, I finally looked for and found a media player with a customizable interface that I like. I'm switching over to using Foobar.

Good bye Winamp 2.71: you were released in December of 2000 and you worked pretty well for me for most of 23 years. I'll miss the way your individual windows snapped to each other so readily.

In describing the design of digital library catalogs, several of my readings and lectures have explained that many users have trouble distinguishing between title, subject, and author searches.

As an information professional in training, I accept that and will try to work with it. But I honestly don't understand it. How can those distinctions be unclear? What is there to not understand? It sounds like this kind of confusion is a significant motivator toward more integrated, keyword-based, 'google-like' search tools. Personally, I don't use those if there's any way around them. I don't want a mixed-up jumble of results from anywhere and everywhere. I want to know what I'm getting and where it's from so I can search categorically and methodically.

I feel like this is some basic disconnect I have with usability issues in catalog design and I'd like to understand it better.

Goodbye Winamp, Hello Foobar

Catalog Design