Freesound Forums

1.

The old controls show mouse-over hover hints about their function.

The new ones do not.

Might be an accessibility issue, just speculating.

2.

The toggle mesasure button seems to have no effect in the new UI

A more important regression here is that the sound player component widgets do not show any controls at all until you go to the trouble to move your mouse over them. The hovering causes them to appear, which is probably why hovering over those controls doesn't do anything special (no tooltips, as hovering is already what is causing them to appear in the first place).

This is bad, IMHO. Just like the way Microsoft decided to hide scroll bars until you hover the pointer right over them, such that now they are a pain in the butt to use on recent Windows versions -- you not only have to put your mouse into the general area where you expect a scroll bar might be hiding, but you have to then hover there for a rather long delay before it shows up -- what a ridiculous time waster -- and they are so small that hiding them really doesn't add that much space to the content that is being scrolled anyway. It's the same thing here. The new UI has chosen to follow a few really bad recent design trends that make things less obvious and less usable.

The worse part about this, however, is that you cannot tell at a glance that this is even a sound player at all because there is no play button (until and unless you hover the pointer over it -- but why would anyone do that?). Seeing that triangle pointing to the right is what clues people in to the fact that this thing is playable. When you make it invisible, users remain clueless. That is very bad, IMHO.

And why? What advantage is gained by making the controls invisible? Is there some important content that they are covering? I say "no". There is no point to this. It just makes the interface enigmatic and confusing, like you are obliged to first explore and get used to how the interface works, perhaps for many minutes, before you can learn it well enough to use it. In other words, it becomes and "old boys club" where only those who have put in the effort to figure out how the interface works will have any idea how to use it. That is the opposite of what the goal should be here. Why not make it obvious what this widget is for? Without controls, it appears to be just a static waveform display.

Hi,

Thanks for the comments!

We'll add the hints to the buttons, thanks for reporting. Also the ruler has not yet been implemented, but it is in the list of things to do.

About player controls only appearing when hovering, this is an aesthetic decision made by the designer and that we also supported. I think waveforms are nicer and cleaner without the buttons, and I could argue that users can learn quickly that waveforms are playable so there's no need to show the same buttons over and over. However if other users also feel that only showing the buttons when hovering is an issue, we can reconsider that. In fact, if you browse Freesound from a touch-enabled device (in which hovering is not very practical), you'll see that we don't hide player buttons to facilitate the interaction

Thanks for the explanation. I asked, "What advantage is gained by making the controls invisible?" I think you may have answered that as "cleaner-looking waveforms", but my whole point was that what you view as "clean" means the user has no visual indication that it is a playable control, which makes it more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Usability and obviousness of function are far more important than cleanliness, IMHO, but I understand that your opinion puts the greater weight on following some fashionable fads in UI design (no matter how impractical they are). I've never been accused of being fashionable.

Hi zimbot, thanks again for your inputs. It is not that we put more weight on "fashionable", but that we thought that by making a cleaner UI it can become more practical and more usable (for some users at least). My point was that having play buttons everywhere can also be seen as adding redundant information which is not really needed because users learn quickly that a waveform is playable. But there's room for many different opinions, specially when discussing UI changes As I said, if others feel that "hidden" player buttons are an issue, we can re-add them.

Thanks, frederic -- there is little chance any design will please everyone. I might suggest a compromise, which is to let the play button remain visible always, while the other tools can appear dynamically (as they do now) -- that would be plenty sufficient to indicate that the waveform is a playable control, while still not being too cluttered. Just a thought.