Continuing the discussion from Roon 1.2 (Build 154) is live!:
I can see what you were trying to do, but it seems harder to read to have the word ‘Play’ everywhere and on a different line to the count. Preferred it how it was to be honest.
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Same here. Greatly preferred previous visuals.
Agreed, I would say that Roon does not make efficient use of all the space available. Sometimes lots of details are crammed into a small space creating a unbalanced overall look with too much unused space. I know Roon is working on this and hope the UI continues to improve especially in this regard.
I would say it’s an improvement over the previous design in the sense that I can now clearly read track counts of 100+ (higher play counts seemed to fade at the edges). In the current design, I would leave out the word ‘plays’ as it takes up a lot of space. But that’s just nitpicking on my part.
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I thoroughly agree. The previous design was intuitive, informative and looked good. The new one is only informative, and less so because harder to understand quickly.
And the fact there is now the word “plays” all the way down the track listing seems poor design in comparison to Roon’s general elegant and economical style.
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I must say I completely disagree. The “dot” play count was horrible and completely non-intuitive. Any change back would be a regression in usability. The current style lets users understand immediately, even if they’ve never used Roon before, that track play is counted and the current play count total.
I can see that the repetition of the word “Play(s)” is annoying, in that case, then drop it on the track line and put a column header, but keep the numbers over dots.
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I also prefer the number rather than the dots, which never struck me as either intuitive or informative, but they looked trendy, I suppose. However, the problem is that the UI design doesn’t use column headers at all, and having to stick one in just to accommodate “Play(s)” seems even more clumsy. Perhaps a Tooltip is the answer?
Edit: strike that suggestion - I see a Tooltip is already deployed - and it gives the date the track was last played, which is even more neat 
To me, the new presentation adds clutter and is harder to see at a quick glance what has plays and what doesn’t (since it’s homogeneous text); I have to stop and read the numbers.
I agree the grid was a bit confusing and esoteric, but it was visually clean. I think this creates a different set of problems.
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I like the new numbers.
I never found the grid confusing, it just made sense to me, but then I like minimalist design based things - esoteric and visually clean is fine by me! Does anyone really care exactly how many times each track’s been played in that view? With the dots it was immediately obvious what the preferred tracks were - especially on newer albums that didnt have many plays. You could absorb the information instantly. The only thing I felt was wrong is when it changed to numerical it was white instead of blue. If you could mouse over the boxes and get the info then that covers both scenarios.
It’s hard for designers to please us all but I hope Roon won’t remove bits of cool design to make it more similar to everything else.
Minor detail anyway I suppose - there are far more important things I’d like to see added or changed - but I just felt this was a really nice unique touch…
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The new design just doesn’t look good. As someone mentioned earlier: You don’t like to look at a page and read the word “Plays” ten times. No, I don’t like it.
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Aesthetically, I like the dots grid better.
Agreed. Except for one thing: what happens when the number of plays exceeds the number of dots? If the grid stayed full with no other indication that more than 12(?) plays occurred for that track, then over time all tracks would seem to be preferred. That would be bad. I didn’t take the time to find out what the UI displayed when there were more plays than dots.
It changed to a number at that point
I also prefer the previous way. It just look like more info clutter now.
So, it changed to a number - presumably without the “Play(s)” text? In other words, like the current display, only without the text? If that’s the case, why not just dump the text?
Exactly, given a long enough time line, then all the dots would morph into numbers anyway. Or worse yet, you’d have an album with some tracks as dots and some as numbers.
How about leaving the field empty until a song has been played rather than the clutter of “0 Plays” all over the place.
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That’s a great idea. +1
I also agree that the new design just doesn’t look good, with the word “plays” repeating in such small font.
I’m not saying bring back the old design, but change it to something that maintains the play count but still looks good.
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My vote goes to removing the word “play” or “plays”, keep the font size the same but center it with the song duration, and change the font color to dark gray on a dark background so it will not stand out too much.