First, just to establish the tone, I love Roon and I looove 1.3.
That said, I have concerns about the user interface. Didn’t bring it up before because I knew the team was busy with deep features.
I will illustrate with specific problems, but I encourage you not to think in terms of fixing individual bugs. I think these issues require serious rethinking. I think they reflect the organic growth of the product: ever since the first, brilliant design, stuff has been added a bit haphazardly.
INCONSISTENCIES
People have raised several inconsistencies in appearance. The heart, mike, three-dot, repeat and shuffle buttons are in varied groupings and arrangements and positions on the pages they appear. Some things are clickable and some are not, with no consistent indication: a gray button, blue text, white or black or gray text. Some clicks change the visual presentation, some change the metadata, some take action, with partial but incomplete indications. These issues matter and should be addressed.
And radio on the playing page: where transfer, a quite complex concept, is just a button, radio gets a whole little panel of explanation. Jeez.
But there are more fundamental inconsistencies, in how information is brought up. Consider the album page:
Tracks and Credits are tabs, one is visible at a time and nothing else is affected. No need to dismiss.
Other versions is in a modal pop up, brought up with a button, dismissed by clicking outside.
Review text expands by clicking on the down arrow, and it is partially modal: the visible stuff in the upper page remains active, but the tracks or credits are gone. It is dismissed with the up arrow.
Currently playing page is modal, and is brought up by clicking on a button, and is dismissed by clicking the same button.
Currently playing full page is modal, and is brought up by clicking a button along the right edge, and is dismissed by clicking an X in the upper left corner.
PDFs open by clicking a button, in an external viewer. Dismiss through the operating system.
Pictures open by clicking a button, in a modal gallery view, navigated or dismissed in a funny way: if I have two images and am looking at the first, clicking to the right of it advances to the second, clicking to the left, above or below dismisses the image (clicking on the image magnifies it).
None of these are recorded in the page history, none are correctly dismissed with the back button.
Other inconsistencies in the artist page: Performer and Composer work as tabs but are selected with buttons and look like pages. They behave quite differently: on the Performer page, categories (Main Albums, Appearances, Tidal Main Albums) are sections in the scrolling page, but on the Composer page, the categories My Library and Tidal are tabs.
On the Performer page, each section can be expanded to show All Albums by clicking on a button, which brings up an entirely new page and is dismissed with the back button.
On the Composer page, the My Library tab just scrolls, but the Tidal tab has multiple pages which you navigate with buttons and dismiss by selecting another page.
This randomness is more disturbing than icon placement and similar details.
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION
I have suggested that we can pick up ideas from some existing news readers, including the New York Times iOS app. This proposal is not exactly like those, but inspired by them.
An album is shown in a long continuous page, divided into sections. Each section can be closed, partially open, or fully open. Imagine a default layout where each is partially open, like the review page is today. I can scan down past all of these sections. If I really want to read the review, I open it, but I can still scroll down and get to the pages below. If I don’t care about the review at all, I can close it and it wastes a minimal amount of space, a single line.
When fully opening a page that is partially open, the existing stuff is not repainted: I see part of the review, and when I open it more text appears underneath and the lower stuff is pushed down.
Now, let’s modify this idea in two ways:
First, there is no default layout (beyond the first time). The system remembers the way I have it. So if I close a review on one album, other albums that I open will show up with the review closed; if I open a review to read it, navigating to other albums will show the review open. This eliminates much of the settings in terms of defaults: there are no defaults, the system remembers. And this memory goes across sessions, and reboots: the system always remembers everything, including where I am. (In my view, the idea of a session is an artifact of an implementation detail, RAM memory is more expensive than disk storage. But I don’t want to care: if I do something in a program, and go away, and come back later to continue, I want the machine to remember everything about what I was doing. And I don’t want that memory to depend on what the machine did in the meantime, run or sleep or patch-reboot or power glitch. We begin to see this behavior in some systems: even Office is cautiously suggesting that it should take you to where you were last in the document.)
Second, I think this model can apply to many of the random behaviors listed above. But not quite all: some things should perhaps be modal. But not many: modality is abhorrent, it interrupts the flow.
So this model still requires some careful thought. And there are plenty of design decisions to make it pretty and convenient, consistency is not the only consideration.
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