Mr. Glimmer: I am not unhappy because I made a mistake. I’m used to making mistakes. However, I’ve been a programmer for more than 40 years. I’ve seen software slowly catch up to attitudes toward error that are common in other engineering-ish fields.
Designers from other fields know that actions with potentially severe consequences should be harder to get wrong. I wrote up a painstaking description of how Roon does not do that: For people who habitually move tracks from one playlist to another, it’s just as easy to move an entire playlist into another. This is bad affordance design: it begs for mistakes the way this door does (it affords pulling, but you have to push):
What you’re doing is blaming the user for reflexively pulling on the door even though he “ought to have known” that it opened the other way. OK. Fine. But I’m asking – at the very least – for the courtesy of an equivalent to the “push to open” sign. (“Do you really want to move this entire playlist into another playlist?”)
One of the reasons air travel in the US is incredibly safe is that the National Transportation Safety Board has a policy of not blaming “pilot error.” Rather, they ask what in the larger system made that error so easy to make. Hard to argue with the results. Dekker’s Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ 3rd Edition is a classic text.
Look. Roon playlist manipulation is badly designed (in, based on 40 years experience, entirely predictable ways: it’s a typical programmerish “let’s find one mechanism / UI to do everything”). A useful conversation would start with one of:
- How might playlist manipulation be made better?
or
- How might we tack on something to warn paying customers not to use it for use cases it wasn’t designed for?
Roon is great at the nuts and bolts. I love the hardware support. The DSP tools are great. They’re not that good at software. That’s OK! But the first step to improvement is to admit your failings. I have previously suggested that expanding their API to include playlists would allow people like me to code up playlist apps tailored to particular constituencies.
Again: I’ve been in the software biz for a long time. I’ve seen this pattern before, including early adopters who so love the potential of the product that they resent later adopters who complain.