In my experience, it often goes like this: Engineers design the system with basic functionality. The requirements guys come back and add features like ‘save all playlist indices’, but crunch time comes, and some manager with zero experience in UX axes the UX features to make budget and/or deadline, crippling the product for want of an extra couple of weeks of development. Or the UX guys say a 'pause ’ button is necessary, but a bean counter axes the feature because it will cost an extra .25 cents per vehicle.
This is why physical buttons went away. Once computerized interfaces with screens arrived, it was way cheaper to put all the functions on the screen rather than have physical buttons. Too bad it makes for a terrible user experience, but only the eggheads in UX care about stuff like that, and they don’t have to make a deadline.
It used to happen to me all the time. Design a great user interface, only to have others cripple it for reasons. Then when people complain about the crippled UX, the managers point at the UX guys and say, “Don’t talk to me - I didn’t design the UX.”
I was in a hotel this week watching TV and it had several streaming services. I used Netflix, and when I wanted to pause a show I simply hit the standard Play/Pause button and it worked as you’d think it should. Then later I was watching a show on the TV on YouTube and hit the same Play/Pause button- nothing! It doesn’t pause! I had no way to pause the show to do something else. Only the next day did I figure out that to pause a video on YouTube I have to hit the OK button on the remote twice! WTF!? What idiot designed that?
Agree with @echoreply that the major issue of alphabetical order comes when it keeps resetting. I am very tired of hearing the first song alphabetically on my playlist.
Also, this may not affect you, but it does affect me–I have multiple versions of some songs. I just counted–I have nine versions (!) for example of “Amazing Grace.” Randomizing means I might get the Mahalia Jackson version or the Canadian Brass version (or less positively, the Pete Seeger or Robert Shaw Festival Singers versions, but that’s okay too). Alphabetical order means I get Mahalia, then Pete, then the Canadian Brass, then…, and while I imagine there might be a time when I would like to hear the same song nine times in a row and compare/contrast the different ways of presenting it, generally speaking I’d prefer to hear it once and then on to something else. Organizing them alphabetically doesn’t help with that! Of course I may be unusual in having multiple versions of the same song.
I’ve never experienced resetting in place in the alpha playlist. And if I did, a quick spin of the dial would slide me down from “A” to maybe “J” then tap “play” and I’m set for another couple of months.
And yeah, my comment that alpha sequence amounts to kinda-randomized as to artist, album, and genre might be true-ish in many (most?) cases, but it sure doesn’t apply to somebody who likes to collect multiple versions of the same song. Nine of 'em, eh. You do you.
It does seem like @Sam_Stone has a real point: good UX is a) difficult, and b) involves supplying a long roster of options to cater to the wide spectrum of individual use cases. Random cutting of features leaves a gappy and awkward UX. Catering only to the fattest of the fat part of the use case envelope might be cheap, but it isn’t good.
To get around the alphabetical thing, for some device, and I can’t remember which, because we’ve had mp3 players for like 25 years now, I randomized the alphabetical order. I had a simple shell script that randomly sorted all of the music files, then prepended 0000_, 0001_, and so on to the front of each file to preserve the random order.
I’m a GIS Applications Engineer. I’ve been working in GIS since before it was called GIS.
I understand user interfaces for GIS and GPS.
With that said, I finally got the manual out of my 2019 4Runner to figure out what the hell was wrong with the GPS in the car (I don’t use GPS in my car hardly at all).
I figured it out… The UI absolutely sucks.
The voice of it may as well say - “Shit, I donno, I’m new to this area. Can’t you figure it out?”
On my truck, pressing the steering wheel Mute button pauses/re-starts play while on a CD, Bluetooth or USB source.
YMMV (Your mileage must vary–it is a car after all.)
Same. Mute is pause for anything not OTA. It can’t pause Sirius XM for example; mute really is just mute for that.
In the case of a phone call, the car answers it and the call audio is routed through the car sound system & microphone(s) on the steering wheel. Yes, I can prevent that with enough fighting and talk directly into the phone or with a dedicated Bluetooth headset.
But the path of least resistance is the car takes the call from the phone and is smart enough to pause the entertainment audio while the call is in progress. that doesn’t help for Sam’s other scenarios where pause is needed for non-phonecall reasons. But that’s what mute is for.
I beg to differ. Our company uses HP Z4’s as desktop PCs and they all have power buttons on the front. And no, they are not pre-1996. Not sure where you got the idea those buttons went away. Is this some Apple weirdness?
The buttons are still there; they just don’t interrupt power. Press it while Windows is running and you’ll find that Windows starts shutting down gracefully and that maybe, eventually, the computer actually turns off.
Some computer power supplies still have a switch that physically cuts power, though you have to reach around the case to get to it. But these are not universal, and I’m finding that even some of these are just of the “hint to the controller chip that you might want to cut power eventually” type.
The power button not actually turning off the power kind of freaked me out the first time I saw it on an Apple Lisa. Long since, I’ve concluded why wouldn’t I want it to shut down gracefully?
Yeah it’s probably that the first button “wakes” the UI and then the second actually does something. I would guess other UI controls would similarly need to be woken.
I’m not defending it, just trying to explain what they were going for.
Actually I used to have an mp3 player that was worse. While playing a track, the UI had various levels of sleep (it dropped back to parent menus over several minutes, then a full sleep of the UI). So if I wanted to go to the next track, say, it might take one press of the next track button, or two, or three, or even four. Surprisingly, I got used to it…I could operate the device without looking, and just got used to “press next track n times until you hear a new track”.
That button is not an on/off button that directly interrupts the flow of electricity into the computer.
Instead It’s a hardwired request to the computer’s operating system to please enter a software-driven shutdown process that ends with the CPU asking the power supply to enter a stand-by state.
Lots of things can not happen according to your expectations during all that processing. The only way to absolutely positively interrupt power to a modern Windows PC is to yank the cord out of the wall and also remove the battery if it’s a laptop / tablet. Which is totally NOT the recommended shutdown process.
Well, one reason is that the graceful shutdown can usually be initiated within the OS itself, obviating the need for any button. I can’t recall the last time I pressed the power button on my machine. Heck, half of my machines don’t even have a working power button, since I build them myself and frequently don’t bother hooking up the jumper (or bother fixing it if I found I jumpered the wrong pins).
So from my view, the only reason to have a power switch at all is if it actually cuts the power, to deal with a hard crash or to prep for maintenance work. A switch is slightly more convenient than physically pulling the plug. Otherwise, the button is pointless.
I have never seen a switch on a PC power supply that didn’t physically cut the power. Are soft switches on actual power supplies a thing now? Of courae the front-panel power button is a soft button, but the rocker switch on the power supply itself?
Cold boots are still a necessity from time to time.
Many power supplies have no rocker switch at all. I’ve seen some where it was clear the switch was not a physical interruption of the line power. They didn’t send the ACPI shutdown signal, but likely notified the PSUs internal controllers to perform a soft shutdown. There was a delay of a few seconds; too long for it to just be capacitors discharging.
Probably saves a few cents to use a 5 VDC, low-current switch instead of a 250 VAC, 10 A one.
Laptop power buttons put the computer in sleep mode when you press it. You need to hold it down for 15-20 seconds to actually turn it off.
Laptops also had the habit of going into sleep mode and not waking up. I fixed quiet a few student computers by holding down the power to turn it off so it rebooted.
Yeah, I’m familiar with the hard boot on a laptop. However, I was talking about the rocker switch on a desktop PSU. I am surprised to hear that some of them apparently are soft switches, because that switch is there to kill power to the computer so you can work on it without fear of frying anything (you should also unplug the computer, but flipping the switch shgould kill all power)… I can see having no switch at all, and requiring the thing to be unplugged, but having a switch that doesn’t behave like other PSU switches seems wrong.
I just looked at a couple of my power supplies, and the rocker switches are 250V AC switches. Therefore, they cut the mains power to the supply itself. leaving no circuitry energized at all. I’m surprised they could get UL/CSA approval for a power supply with a soft switch where normally a hard disconnect would be. Seems dangerous.
and it worked as you’d think it should. Then later I was watching a show on the TV on YouTube and hit the same Play/Pause button- nothing! It doesn’t pause! I had no way to pause the show to do something else. Only the next day did I figure out that to pause a video on YouTube I have to hit the OK button on the remote twice! WTF!? What idiot designed that?