ZUIs can be useful. They can also be pretty horrific. Some folks try go all Minority Report on them. Just need a Roon ZUI and VR glasses…
I think this is the sort of thing you’re suggesting…
https://demo.zegami.com/edinburgh%20fringe
Can you show me or tell me about a useful one? I’ve never found them to be a very good way to explore… @enno is always trying to do thing 2D relational plot thing for artist browsers, and I’ve never been convinced that it’s a good idea.
ZUI’s can be quite horrible indeed if you don’t set restrictions
They work on small data… the iOS homepage where you have apps grouped into folders is a good example.
They also work on data that has natural, discrete, classifications. Network diagrams tend to be pretty horrible at the lowest level, but if you can group things together it can aide discovery. Hassle is at the grouped level, you don’t know what is at the detail level. So you’d know that you have 150 Jazz albums, but so what? Not sure music is the best use case for it.
Zegami is similar to work done at the Microsoft Live Labs. It can be “interesting”:-
But not convinced how useful it is beyond being cool.
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Thanks Sjef, actually a quite inspiring concept you describe here. I find it difficult to grasp, but perhaps that’s partly because, as you say yourself, it’s not a completed idea (yet). The link @anon73739233 provided certainly did help me to understand the concept a bit more, thanks for that.
I think, if indeed well thought-out and restricted, it might work. Don’t have a clue myself, however, how this could be implemented in Roon. But I can see its potential. However, reading Danny’s post, I think he needs some more detail before he’s convinced 
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Do you mean like the mockup that I did? I’m not convinced by it - I’ll have to build a prototype and play with it a bit. I think it depends on the quality and depth of metadata to drive it, and how people explore their music collection. Open poll… do people use the “influenced by, followed by, associated with” section of the artist page today much?
I see it as being similar to a recommendations engine.
I for one certainly use it, to (re)discover. I think equally often as the “Credits” section on the Album Details page.
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Yeah - I use credits a lot to find associations between things.
Yes something like that but then in another layout, with more grouping possibilities then the folder structure shown here. This looks a lot like the raskin desktop for osx and is folder based in a long folder / subfolder structure, something different then we need for browsing music. The grouping in here i static while usefull for some data like photo’s or bunch of pdf’s I never really liked the layout but it’s workable for it’s purpose. A more dymacially sized grouping would work better for our I guess. What it is lacking (at least the Raskin OSX desktop) is a good search engine and narrowing down function. That and a better layout with restriction in the hooverabilty around the giant surface to prevent to get lost to easily comes close to what I mean together with more specific music browsing functionality. But yes, the zooming idea comes from this. Food for thought.
To be very honoust I wouldn’t know either. At least not at this stage. But some of it maybe.
Yes I use them sometimes. I use the “similar artists” more frequently though.
Oops, forgot about that one! I use it just as frequently too though.
I tried Raskin for OS X. I think it stayed on my machine for about 20 minutes. Is it working out for you?
Yes for some purposes. Not as a complete desktop / filebrowser replacement. It works pretty well as a photo browser. I think it’s a pretty good idea but taken a step too far while in the mean time they hold on to a directory structure. Some parts of it are quite nice. I think the layout could be improved wich would be helpful for the usabilty.
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I took a look online for apps that show music relationships and got these:-
and
Again, they look ok, and work ok for small data sets. But trying to get too clever and too “pretty” adversely affects the usability I think. I quite like the grid for this. Instead of infinite drill-in where it becomes 6 degrees of separation, if you click an artist they become the new focus or pivot point. So it contains the data.
I think you are right, not much more then a nice gimmick wich might be too cramped for large collections Discovr seems not to be available in the appstore over here so I could only judge from the screenshots.
Ok… just a simple brain dump here…
First, my feedback on what direction the last part of this topic has been going into:
Looked at Artist Explorer mentioned above… I found it neat, but not giving me any real value from seeing various paths through the tree because of poor lateral dimensionality (why is Roy Orbison linked to Elvis? is it for the reason Chuck Berry is?) Additionally, if you expand too much, it becomes unusable quickly.
Discovr has similar issues, because both it and Artist Explorer are basically just 2 different ways to show DAGs.
Jeff Raskin’s Archy ZUI was mostly boring IMHO… but it did spawn a neat project. His son Aza created a research idea at Mozilla called Tab Candy for managing groups of tabs.
To me, it seems that ZUIs are not very good at hierarchy beyond 2 levels because they are inherently displaying DAGs. Good for clumping/grouping, but not for multidimensional (not just “linked”, but why, when, where, and under what conditions) and deeper cyclic relationships (influencers, followers, collaborators, popular at the same time, etc).
The drawing from @anon73739233 that shows a 2d artist browser in a grid related – it tries to be better than a DAG by using X/Y axis as 2 dimensions of relations. I think that drawing got the axes wrong… but that’s irrelevant because there are so many axes to chose from… 2 will always be lame.
Second, what we have now isn’t bad once you are past the browser:
Think about how one can get lost in the hyperlinked nature of the web, especially wikipedia. It works in Roon too (it’s what you all love about Roon), but it’s really heavy on UI. The artists at the end of the artist page in Roon is REALLY heavy links with great dimensionality. I wish there was more stuff we had data on – maybe something to UGC? Things like:
- Timelines for an artist or band’s life – focusing on releases, collaborations, and membership.
- Sometimes like venn diagrams for collaborations
- Being able to see the context in which composers lives: when (not just dates but periods and styles) and who they possibly knew at the time
- Which songs by an artist are played live at concerts, and how often
- Seeing who opened for what bands at concerts
- Seeing what music various bands/people listen to – especially DJs
All these can be displayed via simple 1d lists with hyperlinking and get you great relations
Lastly, back to the topic of album browser…
One place we are doing design work is to make focus + sort do interesting things to a browser… For example, sorting an artist browser by active date. Displaying the artist list 1 dimensionally, can show more than just relations in dates by adding an extra horizontal piece of data that is a bar that shows a timeline of the artist’s career. Try to visualize imagine a Gantt chart of artist timelines.
Anyway… don’t focus on UI – focus on what data you want to use to further exploration. The UI often just flows out of good data modeling.
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**Nice reply Danny. Yes, focussing on what data should be shown and what it can do for us is a great tip wich I’m certainly going to keep in mind. **
**What you have now is great once you are past the browser, yes absolutely. If I didn’t like I wouldn’t even have bothered with it. I have been trying out other apps just out of interest and for nice ideas. Some have potential but none are as well executed as Roon even if it’s not allways very consistent but that are things I’m sure are going to be solved when things evolve. One thing I like in Roon is that you have managed to make something complicated very easy to use. Even if we can loose ourselves in all the links I never get lost in Roon it’s self and that alone is a pretty big accomplishment. **
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**UGC is a nice way of collecting data, we all know how well wikipedia works but it has to be curated and needs a broad active user base. But I don’t know all the “data sources” out there as much as you do. There might be a good working one allready. **
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**Maybe it’s a good idea to ask people what they would like to see, what kind of data they would like to have to see in their ideal world, without any restrictions, without any fear of being silly. Create a sticky for it maybe, That might eventually lead to some usefull or even suprising ideas… Like mpd said, ask people what they want and their comes nothing, they need a trigger, will be defending the old way first but eventually can come up with great ideas once past that stage be it directly usefull or not, brainstorming is allways usefull. **
**Your artist timeline idea fir example is very interesting. It could show a complete cariere of an artist with album releases, the forming and splitting up of bands he/she was in . Clickable collaborations or album and live performance concepts. Award winnings, links to backgrounds and so on. Nice, specially if it goes deeper into Tidal then the current integration because then there is so much to explore. Samples like this can trigger people to think about what they would like to see on it or not Even if the whole timeline idea in this example is never going to be implemented it can lead to other nice things because it triggers people to use their imagination. That’s the value of tinkering. But on the other hand the Roon team might not be the right people to spread these examples, before you know it the expectations are going trough the roof. **
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**I used to see Deezer and later Tidal as an add-on but after a year of using it with Roon it has become a much more integral part, something like a new collection of 3+ million albums only waiting on new ways to explore it. In that sence an album browser as we know it now might become something of the past completely. Complicated stuff, lovely materie to be tinkering about that’s for sure. **
So, yes please correct me/us if our tinkering is heading in the wrong direction. We have to be encouraged to think out of the box, be it by you guys, be it by others with “crazy” ideas. People might have very good ideas but might be limited in their thinking because they don’t know what data or data sources are available. And as always there will be people who don’t know what they want until they see it, they just wanna be suprised. Nothing wrong with that either.
It would be a great option to have, especially since Album titles are not always communicative.
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