When conducting and writing up user research findings, I make a point of defining the experience goals alongside participant’s actual real life goals. This is because, as users interact with a system, they are made to feel a certain way – just as people can, software can bring the best or the worst out of a user. Yet, while users’ feelings are part of the usability of a software product, we don’t often test to understand that side of user experience.
When I conduct any kind of research with users, I pay attention to how people are feeling and to how they want to feel. For example, of two people who want to use a website to check on their finances, one can tell me: “I want to be in control at all times”; whereas the other might say: “I expect to be alerted when something goes wrong”. To me these two ways of feeling when someone uses software translate into different interface design requirements. The first person wants an interface that makes her feel in control, such as a dashboard tool; while the second user wants something that makes him feel taken care of, e.g., timely reminders and alerts.
All features of an interface can make people feel one way or another. For example, a simple fact like a lack of feedback on a system’s operation, combined with the use of technical vocabulary, can often cause people to feel discomfited and insecure and may cause them to hate the product – but often we overlook users’ feelings in strategy and design in favour of making sure we transmit the information and functionalities we intend. Yet, learning and adoption often depend on the level of enjoyment and confidence a user experiences while engaged with the product.
Rhythmbox
The usability testing of Rhythmbox highlights the power of an interface to stimulate emotions by means of design. In this blog post I will only discuss the findings relating to usability and emotions. A full description of the results of the test is available in the attached pdf. This test was conducted in June 2010 at Canonical.
Many participants expressed feeling inadequate when interacting with Rhythmbox. That said, many of the usability problems participants experienced, some of them serious to the point of preventing them from completing their tasks, could have been easily avoided by:
- offering well-crafted dialogues that anticipate users’ expectations and also provide immediate feedback whenever errors or an idiosyncratic system behaviour occurs. The application should accompany its users through the process of obtaining, listening and organizing music.
- using language that bridges users’ activities and experiences to the domain they are engaged in. As a case in point, when participants are playing with music they are thinking of songs and albums, not of files and folders.
What was striking during the testing sessions was how participants expressed themselves at several junctures of their experience, not in terms of what they wanted to achieve but rather in terms of how they felt:
“I feel dumb right now. It is not doing anything.” [Participant has entered the name of a radio station in the search box of radio, thinking the search box will allow her to find any station she wants. She is not getting any feedback about what's going on.]
“I cannot find a way to put it in the library. I’m dying here, it is not going well, help!” [Importing songs into the library.]
“My head is spinning.” [Trying to subscribe to a podcast.]
“It’s just frustrating because I don’t know what to do.” [Looking around to find where his music has been downloaded.]
“I cannot control where the piece will show up.”
“I feel like an idiot. I don’t know why it’s not working.” [Trying to get a podcast and looking for a suitable url.]
“I feel stupid that I can’t find a podcast.” [Trying to get a podcast.]
“I feel I am missing something.”
These strong feelings came from participants’ inability to predict Rhythmbox:
“I don’t know where this is putting everything.” [Trying to import music from MP3 player - trying to import music in the music sub-folder.]
“I presume the tracks I just played would appear here. But they don’t. I have no idea why. I would presume they would be there.” [Recently played tracks that are not played fully don't appear in 'recently played'.]
“(…) it is not clear. [I] would not know how to put it in my computer. I expected a pop-up that tells me what to do.” [Importing music from CD - no guidance from Rhythmbox about what to do.]
“I don’t know [if there is rock and roll music in radio] because there is nothing going on.” [Participant is trying to find a radio station that plays rock and roll. She hasn't spelled 'rock and roll' in the same way it is spelled in Rhythmbox. She gets no results, that is, all she gets is a blank screen without indication of why and what to do.]
“I don’t know what it wants me to do.” [Trying to connect to Last.fm and finding only an option to sign up or join Rhythmbox group.]
“The app is not giving me anything on what I should do to carry on. Maybe I’m just stupid.” [Trying to enter a url for a podcast.]
“It doesn’t really tell you that it is working or not.” [Trying to get a proper url for a podcast.]
“I don’t understand. I would have done it by now or something should be flashing. Now, I am stuck.” [Importing music from a CD, participant doesn't know if it is in the library already or not.]
This level of emotional discomfort is alarming to users and poses a serious challenge to adoption. Accordingly, it needs to be mitigated and managed. Rhythmbox users should feel happy and entertained and not stressed out. To create an environment that stimulates good emotional states, the application needs to anticipate what users want to accomplish, and it should give users a full understanding of how they can achieve it.
There are two strategies Rhythmbox could adopt to greatly change users’ feelings: first, use language that resonate with users, that is, language that users would themselves use to name buttons and actions; and two, provide feedback to users to keep them aware of how the application is responding to their actions, and in addition provide general guidance through the process.
Let’s look at examples where such interventions are needed.
Unfamiliar or Decontextualised Language
Rhythmbox often uses language that, rather than describing what participants are doing from their point of view, describes what is going on from the application’s point of view.
Example 1: When importing music from various devices.
From a USB memory key
“It said ‘open’ but in fact it is ‘import’. I wasn’t sure [what to do].” [Importing a song from a memory stick.]
“What is a home folder? Why do I need a home folder?” [Import music from a MP3 player.]
Participants did not understand the language used to refer to their songs, including such words as ‘folder’, ‘file’, ‘open’, ‘cancel’. These words were not generally expected to be found in a music environment. When one clicks on ‘move’, for example, the system offers to move the ‘file’ to a ‘home folder’, and this was very confusing to our participants. Participants could not understand what was expected from them because of the language that was used.
Suggestion: use words like album, song, rip-it.
From a CD
A second example of the use of unfamiliar or unintuitive terms can be found in the interaction when participants are looking for podcasts. A few participants, for example, who came across the button ‘Copy tracks to the library’ were not sure what it meant.
“It is not obvious, if it said “Copy music from CD”, it would be more obvious. I don’t know where the library is. I want to know where the tracks would go.”
Example 2: Adding a podcast and a radio station
Participants did not understand many words used in the section on podcast, including ‘episodes’ and ‘feeds’. They thought of a podcast as a single unit and not in the context of a series.
Another problem they encountered pertained to the language of the dialogue box requesting a URL. One participant admitted that she didn’t even know what a url was, and she did not know how to obtain it.
Example 3: Looking at missing files
One participant looked under ‘missing files’ and found a list of songs. He had no idea what these ‘files’ were and why they would be missing.
Language was an important contributor to how people felt because when participants came upon words they didn’t understand, they felt that Rhythmbox was not meant for them. If the words used throughout Rhythmbox were chosen from users’ speak, users would feel that the application is friendlier and would be themselves friendlier towards it.
Lack of Feedback
Another important area of Rhythmbox that posed usability problems and created a feeling of being lost and inadequate can be found in a lack of feedback about what the system is doing in reaction to a user request. Often, participants would do a search or make a request and Rhythmbox would display a blank screen. Participants did not know if their request had been taken into account, if they did not do the right thing, or if there were no answer or data to be had. Participants could not tell the difference between what was an error and what was a mistake. Accordingly, they were not empowered to recover when something went wrong. A few interactions where Rhythmbox provided no feedback early on sufficed to make participants generally pessimistic about their success in using Rhythmbox.
In the examples below, participants didn’t understand what the system was doing and what was expected from them to move forward. A well-crafted dialogue box communicating what is happening or what to do next would solve many of these problems.
Example 1: adding a radio station
Participants did not know the purpose of the search box and what sources it would search through. When they tried to search for a radio station they would get a blank screen where results should appear and no message that the search had brought no results or a message that would let them know what type of research was possible. Consequently, participants were stuck and couldn’t anticipate what to do next.
Suggestion: Indicate the search has found no results and make suggestions for possible searches.
Example 2: searching for a station
One participant tried to find a radio station that played rock and roll music. She entered ‘rock and roll’ in the search box and got a blank screen in response to her request. She didn’t know if there were no rock and roll stations or if it was not searching in the right place. In fact, the problem was with the way she spelled ‘rock and roll’ which was different from how Rhythmbox spelled it.
Example 3: looking for recently played songs
At the end of the usability session, participants were asked to find the songs they had played during the session. When they went to ‘recently played’ they found a blank screen. They didn’t know why their songs were not showing. They needed to figure out that only the songs they had listened to to the end would show up in that section. Many concluded that Rhythmbox just didn’t work.
Every usability test uncovers specific issues. I wrote, for example, on how, with Empathy, the main problem resided in a disconnect between how users assumed how the software would display information on the basis of being a social networking application and how Empathy itself had, rather, taken the model of an email server for historical reasons unknown to new users. This disconnect perturbed the user experience and made it less fluid. With Rhythmbox, it was a use of technical and work-based language combined with a lack of feedback that caused the most problems to participants and illustrated how deeply an interaction design can affect users’ emotional states and their confidence in the software.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts. It’s very interesting to get feedbacks like this, I’m sure it will help to improve Rhythmbox.
I like this software and I try to stick with it, but even if I’m a kind of “Power user”, I sometimes get stuck, not knowing what to do or how to process. It was the case a while ago when I wanted to listen to French radio… I had to go on an Ubuntu forum to find out how to do!
Now you’ve got all these information, how are you going to proceed with Rhythmbox? Are you going to ask some Canonical developers to patch this, or are you going to discuss with the Rhythmbox developers, or… ?
“If the words used throughout Rhythmbox were chosen from users’ speak, users would feel that the application is friendlier and would be themselves friendlier towards it.”
So who exactly is this mysterious ‘user’? All the ‘improvements’ that you suggested might (and will) as well be nothing more than visual clutter for a lot of users. It all depends on your audience, so in order to make sense of your report, it would be incredibly helpful to know who you are targeting with Rhythmbox and Ubuntu in general.
The inability to predict Rhythmbox because of missing feedback may as well be an undisturbed workflow for other users. Implementing additional dialogs for feedback will inevitably alienate other users who feel that their train of thought gets interrupted by these same dialogs frequently.
So who were your participants? How old were they? What was their technological background? What was their cultural background? Why were they chosen? It would help a lot to understand and interpret your results.
Nice Post. I have no doubts about Rhythmbox’s qualities as an audio-player but, it’s ugly, sometimes complicated to use and its dialect is ridiculous. Also have to agree with all the comments concerning the radio stations (which I use most of the time). I always struggle when trying to add new radio streams from Shoutcast or another source.
I wonder what comes next. Can you let us know what are you planning?
@fpkettelhoit:
I’m not a developper,just a simple user,I use Ubuntu every day and I think you are not serious,do you really mind the thing you wrote ?? Today ,what do I do with Rhythmbox ? just listening my Song whose are on the Music folder… I never feel Rhythmbox was Powerful because of such issues mentioned here. Just ask yourself why many people jump from Rhythmbox to another media player… the answer is simple,lack of confidence. I use Rhythmbox, but I ‘m not so proud of this player…
@shindz:
I am completely serious about this. To judge the efficiency of a design one has to know the target audience. The same software that may be considered to be ‘bad design’, ‘useless’ or anything like that may in fact be a perfect design for a very specific group of people with clearly defined needs.
Who is this user that we are talking so much about? There is already a tremendous difference in the needs of people coming from different cultures, leaving things like age and field of work completely aside. These ‘issues’ may actually be a benefit for a specific group of users, so it would actually be quite interesting, who was the target of this usability research.
@shindz:
I totally agree with you, that is actually the reason we are so careful when we chose our usability participants.
For these sessions, we had participants professionally recruited with the following characteristics:
1. Heavily into music – listen, search, import, create, share and buy/sell music and listen regularly to podcast. They also were required to use a variety of devices.
2. Highly competent internet and computer users
3. Strong interest in technology
Our participants were between the ages of 19 and 45 (6 were under 40). Five were Windows users, 1 Mac and 2 used both Windows and Mac. One participant was a composer and another a music consultant.
The most important for the testing was that participants were familiar with many music players and had a wide experience with caring for their music.
@fpkettelhoit:
I’m afraid I’m serious.
w1ngnut:
What comes next? I had discussions about these findings with the Rhythmbox developers. Some of the issues have been fixed already!
I guess this useful feedback will be sent to upstream Rhythmbox developers as well ?
gotunandan: We have already been discussing the findings.
As always, your findings are informative beyond the scope of the single application you are reviewing. These studies, I hope, will alleviate some of the concerns that Canonical doesn’t contribute back to “the source” as it may be. Looking forwards to your findings on Shotwell. Be sure to add the PDF in the “Research” section.
Thank you.
Are there plans to redesign the U1 music store plugin to also address the stated concerns that apply? For example the plugin very deliberately places the U1 purchased music in a separate hidden ( .something ) folder on the client system.
Is Canonical going to make the plugin behave differently so its easier to find the music in response to to this feedback?
@Charline Poirier
Not one linux user?
Rhythmbox is a joke, you can’t even reorder the playlist’s fields the way you want to.
The indicator makes accessing it super annoying, I mean why on earth is the show Rhythmbox menu item almost at the bottom of the menu? Will users use only the other functions and won’t even need to open Rhythmbox?
I could go on and on and on, but it’s hopeless, Rhythmbox is a useless application, you should move on to Banshee or XMMS, virtually every other music player is better.
Steve,
Are you really putting the blame on how the indicator works at the feet of the rhythmbox developers? How the indicator works is a direct result of the decision making of Canonical’s design team who have built the indicator system and chosen how to expose functionality in the indicators which exist… not any particular upstream application developer. Credit where credit is due.
-jef
Interesting… I’m an quite experienced computer-user, and I like to go through all menus and functions, so I have no problem managing different programs. My girlfriend on the other hand, for her the computer is a tool, which has to do what she tells it to do instantly, otherwise she will just leave it there. She don’t have curiosity or the patience to “explore” programs as I do. So for her, and all other non-interested persons, improving the dialog and the usability in general would do a lot I guess…
I know that the design team did this, this is why I’m telling it here :)
There are a lot of issues with Rhythmbox like inflexible UI that wastes space. An example, above the browser(or whatever I should call it) there are 3 buttons “All Artists Albums Titles”, can a user normally tell what they do?
The left side sidebar is a waste of space.
The import errors… omg, I don’t even want to get started on this one.
The other issue that I already mentioned about the playlist.
What does the search box in the Radio pane do? Why do I need it?
Why can’t I import a .pls file as a radio stream, every radio on the net publishes .pls files, still a lot of music players can’t handle it.
These are just some errors that I discovered by looking at Rythmbox for like 30 seconds…
Oh, and by the way, as a teacher I appreciate Vygotsky too:)
@Charline Poirier:
Very interesting findings.
For me the most unexpected feature of Rhythmbox came together with the App Indicator. If you start Rhythmbox from the Applications menu, you won’t see a Rhythmbox window. its immediately hidden in the Sound menu. To really get a Rhythmbox window (what one expects by launching it), you have find the icon in the other corner of the screen, find the menu, click the entry “show Rhythmbox”.
This new feature is developed by Canonical. You don’t need a design-study to find out that this is not user friendly.
@Philipp Gassmann I think this issue was already resolved as one of the papercuts for Maverick
This type of testing is exactly what we are taught is an integral part of UI design. Making it more user friendly wont hurt those who are already proficient and help those with less technical ability to feel comfortable. I agree about the “show rhythmbox” idea (similar to oulook on windows) being extremely poor design for usability, and as being an improvement for the more technical. My opinion is to leave it out. Also the wasted space (posted above) is correct. Small changes to make what i see as a wonderful app more accessable to its users. Now all we need are some cool plugins like a duplicate music finder.
I am a computer power user, but even in my eyes having to manually paste in a podcast feed URL is an unnecessary chore, I can’t imagine anyone feeling differently. That is above and beyond the (IMO) obvious findings that average users don’t have a clue what to do when prompted to add a feed url.
In this day and age people expect to be able to browse a web site style interface and pick the podcast they want to listen to. Is there not a way you can embed a podcast directory website into the app the same way you embed the 7Music store?
Jef Spaleta, Philipp Gassmann: Canonical did not design or implement the Rhythmbox menu. (If we’d been involved, we would have just left the notification area item as-is until it was replaced by the sound menu.)
Thanks for doing this, great point about the language!
I want to point something out about rhythmbox : Sometimes, I just launch an album and fine one song very interessing just for that moment and wanted to repeat only this song from the album without the need to run another player just for that. A lot friends come to me and when hearing a song , wanted to repeat only the playing song, but it was impossible to do with Rhythmbox and I felt ashamed from Rhythmbox…The repeat action present applies for all the Albun or Collection. :(
mpt,
What? The rhythmbox indicator menu is NOT a Canonical built patch? So who developed it? Is the currently shipping rhythmbox indicator menu not an outgrowth of
the example code written about here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators
which references very specifically the launchpad bug report:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/495225
Which reads:
“The Ayatana team would like to add support to Rhythmbox for application indicators in Lucid.”
And has an initial patch from Cody Russell as a Canonical employee.
And according to upstream this menu is still an ubuntu-specific patch and not part of the upstream codebase yet.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615093
which also refers to this bug:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/512196
All of this indicates to me that the DX team at Canonical is original responsible for the current rythmbox application indicator menu code. Is that not the case?
-jef
I must admit to never quite understanding the relationship between the browser and the play queue. If I’m just working in the browser I never can figure out what’s going to play next– so I usually just make sure to explicitly add stuff to the play queue and only tell it to play from there.
@Charline: Thx a lot for the info about the choice of the participants. But why did you establish these criteria and not different ones? Is the target audience of Ubuntu “Highly competent internet and computer users” and “heavily into music”? If yes, why is this the target audience of Ubuntu and not someone else. If no, what is the target audience of Ubuntu and why? Answers to these questions would help tremendously to evaluate all the developments going on in Ubuntu Design right now. :)
Thank you for this kind of post. It’s a very very interesting read.
fpkettelhoit,
To your first point:
The type of participants selected for testing Rhythmbox is not necessarily representative of the general Ubuntu target user, indeed. But it is reperesentative of Rhythmbox target user.
My concern with these usability sessions was to get feedback from people who have clear music goals, have developed some skills relating to dealing with music and have used other tools. In addition, to get reliable data the tasks have to feel familiar and make sense to participants so they can understand these tasks in the context of their everyday lives. Participants who do no listen to music on a regular basis would have had less clear needs to fulfill, would have had a low motivation to figure Rhythmbox out, and may have struggled with functionalities for which they couldn’t really see a purpose.
Applications we test need to make sense to participants at the outset.
To your second point:
As for your other point about Ubuntu target user, Marc Shuttleworth sees Ubuntu’s next challenge to bridge the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw2w0GPWPOk&feature=player_embedded
Jef: You’re right, the patch was by Cody Russell. My mistake. I’ve removed the link to the Rhythmbox bug report from the wiki page, because it’s not a good example (music players should use the sound menu instead).
The only real problems I have with Rhythmbox nowardays stem from Canonical’s redesign of the icon in the “Notification area”, sorry, I mean Indicator Applet. I start Rhythmbox from the menu, it starts minimised to that Indiactor applet. I double click on the icon – nothing happens. I right click on the icon, I get a menu for the Indicator Applet. I say, “I feel stupid. I’m annoyed. Why can’t I remember that they’ve… er… ‘improved’ the interface.”
I also find it interesting that people are complaining because Rhythmbox is not giving them information about, for example, where their music has been downloaded too etc, when Ubuntu’s plans for the new Rhythmbox Sound Menu control system seem to aimed at controlling Rhythmbox without using the main window, with a minimalist amount of information. Also, Ubuntu’s plans for the Indicator Applet seem to involve a lot of reducing information, reducing choices, removing customisability, as it’s all apparently confusing, when your sample seem to want more information, more control, more guidance.
all this negative rhythmbox hate 8(
i love rhythmbox. maybe loves to stronger word. admittedly it could be more intuitive but most music players have quirks. ever used iTunes!
I think the play queue feature is great and most other players don’t get this right. in rhythmbox it makes very good sense.
The search feature in playlist/library view is useful too if say I want to listen to all megadeth just type megadeth and play. yes i could “browse” to the artist but this takes longer. you can also play all songs with the word “rose” or other weird stuff like that if you wish.
It has a nice clean interface that is straight forward. most other players especially for windows are heavily skinable which I would say contributes to confusion. admittedly I think it could make do with space a lot better but thats almost a gnome-wide problem where the standard chrome can take up a lot of space.
Its got a lot of potential and not enough people give it credit. I like it. I hope this study helps it become more popular.
I don’t mind Rhythmbox, but compared to closed source music apps, It is quite ugly, and has a lack of features.
En español…
Me gusto mucho el articulo ahy muchas cosas que realmente me siento así… creo que las modificaciones tu propones servirían mucho! Mejorarían mucho ala aplicación y la relación con el usuario.
What great research. Probably some of the most useful information that Rhythmbox devs can get.
Putain, Rythmbox c’est vraiment pourri
les commandes de bases sont absentes,
l’exemple avec la répétition en boucle d’une chanson.
Le pire c’est quasiment tous les logiciels dispos sur ubuntu sont pareils. Les développeurs sont des billes.
I translate :
you are a poor bouffon, and if you do want this more basic functionality (loop one song) in Rhythmbox, it means that you are a poor linux user, and we have higher standards on the choice of our users. I have also instructions that prevent me from admitting that Rhythmbox is not intuitive and have big drawbacks.
Rhythmbox is not too bad, but it’s great to see it get some hi love. I use it for lastfm and that area needs some work (I’m sure I saw some mention that someone was working on this).
There’s a patch floating around that uses the lastfm client to submit data, if that allows me to see what’s currently being plyed in the client maybe it should be applied.
Also, when an error happens with lastfm rhythmbox seems to try and play the error webpage, but instead tells me an error about a mime type.
It’s fine to show the list of lastfm tracks, bit ones already played should either disapear or be greyed out, as you get the above error when trying to play them.
Having to permantly add each kind of lastfm search (eg friends of username) also isn’t the most intuitive.
Silly phone I meant UI not hi