Speaking of portable music players, I’ve always been curious about why they don’t use audio more in the UI. They are intrinsically audio devices, after all. The only other way an iPod has to communicate to you is with its display, and that is useless when your eyes are on something else (like that mattress on the road, look out!).
With the iPod Shuffle the point is moot because the device is mute. There is no display at all, so you must navigate across and within songs by trial-and-error. Playlists are precluded from the device because there is no good way to navigate them. This makes it hard to use the same Shuffle for different situations. If you don’t have one, believe me, stepping through tracks on a Shuffle is a real pain.
You already have the earphones in. Why shouldn’t the iPod use them to speak with you? Here are some details of how it could work.
The design to steal is for the music player to use the headphones to give you information to tell you information and enhance its usability. What might the iPod whisper into your ear?
- a “rising” sound effect for next track and corresponding “falling” sound for previous track
- better yet: verbal announcement of the track number as you skip forward and back: “Track four. (press forward) Five. (press forward) Six. (press back) Five.” This would help you know where you are on the disorienting Shuffle.
- bips for every 10 seconds you are fast forwarding, because it’s really hard to know where you are without looking when fast forwarding a digital player
- Better yet: verbal feedback to how far you are fast forwarding or rewinding in rising increments as you hold the button down: “(blah blah) bip (blah blah) bip (blah blah) ten seconds, twenty seconds, forty seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds”
- For shuffles, pre-render text-to-speech of the tracks on the desktop before syncing to the device. The device would declare the names of the songs as you skip around: “Alicia Keys track three superwoman. (forward) four: no one. (forward) five: Like You’ll Never See Me Again.”
- To bring badly needed playlists to the shuffle: “(press Up button) Playlist one: running mix. (press next) two: ted talks (press select) Track eight: Jeff Hawkins (track then plays)”
(I deliberately omitted sound effects for changes of volume level, which would interfere with enjoying the audio.)
Music players (including cellphones) have direct line to the user’s ear. Why not make use of that for useful UI information?
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(Readers: Does the Zune or any other music player reinforce the user interface with sounds?)
Hey there Philip! on that music product i was working on a few years back, i had a similar idea for text-to-speech in the system. the scenario that i had in mind was that if you are across the room and want to change up the music collection (with a different playlist for example), the device would tell you the playlist names as you were skipping through them. we had a cheapo remote of course (no lcd) but with the latest remotes with lcds built-in, seems like it wouldn’t be as necessary. i can definitely see this needed in the car too.