OK. I think I understand. If I’m right, it’s the sort of thing programmers like to call “user error” or “works as designed”. I won’t go into a long user-experience spiel, but I think a design that allows a single click to cause a lot of hard-to-repair damage deserves to be called a bug.
I will copy this to Feature Suggestions but leave it here in case someone else has the same problem in the future.
My use case: I have a temporary “Artists to Watch” playlist. As I listen to tracks, I sometimes want to (1) move the track – or perhaps several – to an appropriate playlist, and (2) delete it from “Artists to Watch”. Here’s a screenshot of the starting state of that process.
Notice that there are three identical “…” buttons that each bring up a popup context menu with a “Add to Playlist button”. The top left and bottom right buttons both do the same thing in the most common case (where only one is selected). (I know you don’t need to select a single track to move only it with the track-level “…” button, but doing so that displays up the big red REMOVE button, so the “move” process can be (1) click “…”, (2) click “add to playlist”, dismissing the context menu, and (3) press REMOVE. That’s not really more efficient, but it’s the habit I got into.)
Now notice which “…” button is closest to REMOVE. Not the button that adds the single entry, or the button that adds all selected entries, but the button that adds an entire playlist to another playlist. If you’re careless, the affordance of being close to the next button you want to press will incline you to click on that one, the very worst one, the one that might add 150 hours of tracks to a playlist that already has them.
Notice that the “…” buttons will bring up somewhat different context menus, but muscle memory is going to move you directly to the part of the menu that looks the same in all three. You won’t see the rest of the menu because you know where you’re going.
Because there’s no “delete all duplicates in this playlist” action (right?), this is an expensive typo to make. (I’m going to look for the first duplicated track and delete everything past that. But note that’s actually not easy to do – if you narrow the search to look for it, when you back out of there, you go to the top of the playlist, not the selected duplicate. So as far as I can tell, I have to guess where the first duplicate is and scroll around until I find it. A pain with 6000+ tracks. Also, I have to handle specially any things I added since I made the mistake. At this point, things are scrozzled enough that I’m going to lose a fair amount of work.)
Suggestions:
- Put an “Are you sure you want to add the entire playlist?” confirmation popup.
- Is adding one playlist to another a common enough operation that it should look like the other “…”-button options?
- Provide a way to delete all duplicates. Oh please please please.
And:
- Provide a way to move a track from one playlist to another. I personally would prefer it if it didn’t produce duplicates unless you specifically ask it to, especially since it’s tedious to delete duplicates.
- Maybe tailor the popup context menu so it says something like “add 2 tracks to playlist”, rather than having that information out of focus in the top-left of the window.