Fiio X5 high-def media player: quick review

I recently upgraded an iPod Classic 160GB to a higher-definition, larger-capacity Fiio X5 (first generation). The main selling points for me were:

• dual micro-SD card slots for up to 512GB of storage 
• high-quality DAC
• support for all the formats I use
• good battery life
• frequent firmware updates

Unfortunately, the device I got has to go back. It's probably defective, but it also has significant UI problems (even in firmware version 2.6). Here's a summary.

• turning the device on almost never works. I always have to reset it (hold the power button down for 15+ seconds) and then try to turn it on (hold power button down for 2 seconds). Most of the time, that doesn't work and I have to do the whole operation again. Occasionally several times. This means it takes 1-2 minutes just to get the device ready to use. iPod = instant, and it always works.
• the hardware buttons do not work when the display goes to sleep. To turn the volume up or down, pause, play or skip, you have to click the power button, then the hardware button you want. 
• Sure, you could set the display never to go to sleep, but you lose the battery-saving benefits. And the default behavior is for the display to go to sleep, which means the out-of-the-box configuration doesn't work the way you'd expect, and requires two clicks to perform any function.
• the two points above often combine for maximum annoyance. When the display goes to sleep (or the device enters some kind of low-power mode that lets the music play), and the power button doesn't work, which means you can't pause / unpause / skip / adjust the volume. The only option is to reset the device (hold power button down for 15+ seconds), start it up, try again if it didn't work, and make your change.
• Except when the device comes back from a reset, it doesn't remember what track was playing, so you have to browse your library all over again, find whatever you were playing, and play it again.
• browsing the SD card or the library is impossibly slow. 
• The jog wheel scrolls through the library at the same speed, no matter how quickly you're jogging. On the iPod, after a certain speed, the scrolling speeds up and skips whole letters in the alphabet all at once. On the Fiio X5, if you have 500 artists and want to listen to Zimmer's Hole or Zoe Keating, you'd better have a sandwich at hand, because it's going to take a while.
• When you're tired of Zimmer's Hole and want to switch to Frank Zappa, each step (tracks -> album -> artist (Zimmer's Hole) -> scroll -> artist (FZ) -> album -> tracks) takes 2-5 seconds. So switching to an album by a different artist can take up to a minute.
• Because the device needs to be reset constantly, loading up two different albums is a multi-minute ordeal that simply doesn't happen on the iPod or any smart phone.

It's a shame, because the audio quality is truly fantastic. But the device itself is unusable.

The 5 Stages of Design

I'm a terrible designer. Hell, I'm not a designer at all. I can usually tell when a UX is good or bad, and I know what I like, but when it comes to producing designs, I'm useless. My only saving grace is that I know that and let others do the pretty.

Sometimes, though, it's easier to explain something with a picture than a bunch of words. So I bust out the Paint.NET and try to line things up well enough the idea is conveyed, but sloppily enough it's obviously not a final mockup.

In my early days at Crunched it took a few interesting conversations to get that process fine-tuned to work with our designer. I was unaware of the torment I was putting her through. Now we've agreed that...

• this is not my job
• it's still ok and moderately useful for me to do graphics every so often to convey an idea
• it's ok to laugh at them

Inevitably, though, when I present my "work", there's some trepidation about what horrors will be shown, and (legitimate) questions about whether what is seen can ever be unseen, etcetera. So today we identified the five stages of design:

1. Denial. (e.g. "WTF IS THIS or YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS")
2. Grief (e.g. "MY EYES!!!!!!!!")
3. Mockery (e.g. "LOL")
4. Acceptance (e.g. "Ok, I see what you're trying to do here")
5. Improvement (e.g. "I'll make it pretty")

I wonder how common this is for designers.

Personalize like it's 1995

This is what I see on Hulu when I'm not logged in:

And this is what I see when I am logged in:

Notice the difference? Me neither. I've never watched Cougar Town or any of the other shows on the home page. I never watch clips--only full-length episodes. And I only ever watch one show on Hulu--Law and Order SVU. Nothing else, ever. Personalizing my home page to my tastes would be completely trivial: just add a link to the last show I watched. They don't need a $1M recommendation algorithm to pull shows I may want to watch--just a list of shows I've watched in the past would be nice.

I wonder what Hulu's engagement metrics look like. I know every web site has priorities to juggle, and maybe recommendations aren't at the top of that list. But engagement and stickiness are crucial to all ad-supported sites, and especially media sites. So why isn't Hulu trying a little harder to get me to engage with their site by giving me ways to get to the shows I want?

Overloaded 404 part deux

I just noticed Backpack by 37Signals also 404s when you access a page you need to be logged in to view.

STOP THE MADNESS!

And of course, if I tell them it's bad UX, they're likely to tell me to go f*** myself.

The art of choosing fonts

Wells Fargo emails use a pretty wild array of fonts.




Reminds me of those vintage mixed-font posters (source).

This is why Apple wins on mobile devices

I recently switched to an Android phone because my non-evil carrier's data plan is not compatible with the iPhone. I like the MyTouch 4G fine--it's fast, and not hobbled by the same arbitrary restrictions Apple phones are. I like being able to install any email program I want and pick the best. But it's not as polished or slick as the iPhone, in terms of integration and general usability, and if the iPhone were available on non-evil carriers I'd seriously consider switching back.

This gauntlet of installation steps for the Amazon app store application is emblematic of the state of Android on mobile devices:

Download the Amazon Appstore app immediately by clicking [link] from your Android device, or follow the click-by-click guide below.

Click-by-Click Guide

You need to do this only once for each device. The clicks below should take less than 30 seconds.

Click 1

Open your device Settings and click "Applications".

Click 2

If unchecked, click "Unknown sources". If "Unknown sources" is already checked, skip to Click 4.

Note: AT&T Wireless does not support the Amazon Appstore for Android. See Help for more details.

Click 3

Click "OK" on the "Attention" dialog. "Unknown sources" will now have a green check.

Click 4

Open your notifications and click the e-mail message from Amazon Appstore.

Click 5

Click the link: [link]. The Amazon Appstore app will download to your device.

Click 6

Open your notifications and click "Amazon_Appstore.apk".

Click 7

Click "Install".

Click 8

Click "Open".

That's it! Sign in with your Amazon.com account and start enjoying thousands of apps for Android. You need to do this only once for each device.

"That's it"? Seriously?

Most of this is the price of freedom (in the free-software sense) and the all-purpose nature of Android, which is an "open-source software stack for mobile devices" (as opposed to a UI and operating system designed for exactly two devices, the iPhone and iPad): generic software is inevitably less integrated and smooth because it's meant to function in a wide variety of heterogeneous environments (think off-the-rack v. bespoke suits). What's sad is that most attempts at improving the native Android UI and integration seem to be driven more by silly branding and business deals than by a genuine concern for user experience.

Many of the most successful computing products have benefited from a (more-or-less) benevolent dictator making the hard choices about what is or isn't going into the final product: Apple, of course, but also Linux, MySQL and Python come to mind. Compare that to the confusing, inconsistent array of products (even open source) churned out by headless democratic nerd posses like the Mozilla Foundation with its multitude of browsers (Firefox, Camino, SeaMonkey), calendars (Sunbird, Lightning), extensions ("add-ons", "extensions", "plug-ins") and skinning engines (personas v. themes, which are "add-ons" themselves); or the Linux UI community, with Gnome and KDE and so many other options.

Maybe it's time for a strong leader to emerge and make the Android people focus on one optimal, uncluttered, integrated experience. Fat chance.

Mozilla: Please Fix This

All the tools I use professionally are open source, with the exception of MS Office and Visio. My browser is Firefox, my email client is Thunderbird, and I manage my calendars with whichever calendaring program wasn't abandoned by Mozilla. By and large Mozilla software it's pretty good. It does the job very well much of the time, and competently almost all the time; but I do wish Mozilla had a little more UI sense and discipline to make better, clearer choices in their product development.

Tabs, Tabs, Everywhere
Thunderbird makes a big deal of its tabs. "Now with tabs, better search, and email archiving" is the main selling point on the download page:



Now, I'm all for innovative UIs, but did the world really need tabs for email? Email has been around for decades, and mostly mainstream for 15 years. Most consumer desktop programs open a new window when you open an email. It's pretty much the standard paradigm for desktop clients; web and mobile clients are probably making this paradigm semi-obsolete, but millions of people use desktop email programs every day, so it's not dead yet. And I don't think tabs are the way to go for email.

Sure, you could make the same argument about browsers: before tabbed browsers started gaining market share, new pages opened in new windows, but tabs have proven themselves as a superior alternative for many people. No argument from me; I used a tabbed wrapper around IE back when Firefox (then Firebird) was more unstable than Jeffrey Dahmer. But a browser has one primary function (viewing web pages), whereas email clients have a long history of letting you manage more than just email, with calendaring, to-dos, notes, and various other things. And that is where the tabbed design breaks down, and why emails shouldn't be opening in tabs. Note I don't expect the Mozilla people to read, care about, agree with, or implement any of these suggestions; after all, it took them years to fix the horrible usability error whereby you couldn't disable the functionality that marks emails as read when displayed in the preview pane. This is the one problem that prevented me from using Thunderbird as my email client. It's now an option, and disabled by default, if memory serves--thanks! But I'm going to gripe^H^H^H^H^Hwrite about it anyway.

It's a pretty common occurrence for me to get an email trying to set up a meeting, with "Does Thursday at 3 work for you?" That's not exactly convenient if you use Thunderbird for calendaring with the Lightning plug-in--now you have an email in a tab, and your calendar in a tab, and so you can't look at them at the same time. You can't alt-tab between them. You have to be keyboard-savvy enough to know that ctrl-tab is how you flip through tabs in a tabbed MDI program. Opening an email in a tab is also not as dramatic visually as opening a new window, so it was pretty frequent for me to open an email multiple times because I hadn't seen the new tab.

Tabs work well for distinct top-level features in Thunderbird: email, calendar, notes, to-dos, etc. Using tabs for sub-features of any of these breaks the hierarchy.

To their credit, Thunderbird lets you disable tabs for email, and that's the first thing I did, but it shouldn't be the default.

Drag Queens
While on the subject of Thunderbird, when dragging attachments onto a message window, why does the main message body not register the drop, while the "To:" section does? What kind of sense does that make?



Conceptually, the attachment is closer to the body of the message; it has nothing to do with the recipients. I understand why the whole address section is a drop target--that's because the attachment summary opens a little square to the right of the address section when you've added an attachment. But that square is nowhere to be seen until you've added said attachment, making it very non-obvious how you're supposed to attach files, especially if you've tried to drop a file onto the message body and failed. Come on, folks, this isn't hard. Get it right.

Tangent #1
Speaking of drag and drop: why do bloggers and web content creators still put up with the pre-2000 model of having to explicitly upload their photos via a dedicated upload form, and (if they're lucky) move it into place in their rich-text editor? Why haven't enough smart techies come up with a standard way to let people just drag a photo from their desktop onto their rich-text editor and have it show up in the right place, without having their text reflowed or mangled beyond repair?

I know the technical answer; what I want to know is why people aren't angry enough about it to demand a fix. Software should be transparent; exposing the nasty technical guts of the software by not providing an integrated experience is a sad cop-out, and the web community should do better.

More T-Bird
While on the topic of Thunderbird, another little thing that wouldn't hurt is to add a little intelligence into the parsing and display of the email. Apple's terrible Mail program does this remarkably well by automatically highlighting words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" and showing a context menu to create events in their otherwise execrable iCal program; it also highlights contact information like phone numbers detected inside an email.

What I'd like Thunderbird to do is be a little smarter in the message display. When someone receives a message and highlights a section of it, then right-clicks on it, why not show a Search for xxx in your browser (using the default browser and search settings)? Even better: if you can detect that the highlighted string is an address, add a link to a map (a Google map would guarantee even more money for the Mozilla foundation); a phone number? Show a context menu to add it to your address book (together with sender's name and email), or overlay the contact's info if you can find it in the address book.

Yes, I know, I can edit the code myself and probably finagle my changes into the trunk, but why should I have to?

Pick One
One last gripe: I wish the Mozilla folks would just focus a little. Why have plug-ins, add-ons and extensions? Why even use that awful phrase "add-on", when "extension" is pretty clear (extensions extend the basic functionality, get it?) and a lot less techy? Similarly, why have both themes and personas? And why have Firefox, Seamonkey and Camino? Why not call them Firefox, Firefox Suite and Firefox for Mac, if you must distinguish, since they share so much of their rendering technology? What are the differences within those product families? Is there a difference? Most importantly, why should the end-user care?

With double-digit market share, Firefox isn't the bailiwick of basement-dwelling, Gentoo-compiling geeks anymore, so the old hyper-specific tech terminology needs a revamp.

Sliders on the Web

Browsing a site I'd never seen before, I saw a cool nod to accessibility: the site lets you make the size of the type in the main article bigger.

Great.

Except.

The control to do this is a miniscule Javascript slider.



So in order for their special font-size needs to be accommodated, users with those needs must acquire a tiny target that's 7 pixels in diameter, hold the mouse button down without moving of the target, drag it over by a few pixels without accidentally releasing the mouse button, and finally release the button when they're done.

And all that is after they've realized that thing can be clicked on and dragged.

And unlike a real, standard desktop UI slider widget, you can't click on an arbitrary point on the slider rail and make the slider jump to that spot. The only way you can change the font size is by sliding.

And the range of sizes is only a handful of discrete font sizes, not a continuous value (which is what sliders are good for).

And the target users for the grow-the-font feature are typically those who will have more problems dealing with small-target widgets and/or drag and drop.

And it's not keyboard-controllable the way a plain text link would be (you can't tab to it, and you can't move it with the keyboard).

That's a lot of "and"s, and just as many reasons why this is a bad design decision. This is nothing new--it's been known for ages that drag and drop is hard to perform and non-intuitive for certain actions. So why put a hard, unnecessary constraint into Web pages?

I don't know what made sliders in Web apps so popular in the past couple of years, but I really wish designers and developers would realize what a horrible widget they are. They're very difficult to acquire, maneuver and discover, and you can always replace them with an easier, more discoverable UI element.

Here are obvious suggestions that would take exactly the same amount of space on the screen and considerably less time to implement and debug, not to mention obviating the need for the slider JavaScript library to be downloaded with the page:

1. icons of the letter A in different sizes, each mapped to a font size
2. one big icon of the letter A with an up arrow next to it, and another with a down arrow next to it. Ideally the "shrink" A would be a little smaller than the "grow" A
3. text links labeled "bigger font" and "smaller font"
   

Simple and standard usually win in my book; the burden of proof is always on the more complicated option.