Thursday, January 24, 2008

When all you have is a pie hammer, the whole world looks like a pie nail


Just look at that! What is a pie menu doing there? ARGH. This is a problem when you spend all your time reading about and creating interfaces. Any sexy technology can catch your eye and overwhelm your reasoning.

Why not just have a play button off to the right of every song? It would be easy enough to either 1) show a ton of play buttons, or 2) show the play buttons on mouseover. You could probably even think of a 3) something better. That's just off the top of my head.

The pie menu gives no affordance as to how to play a song (the point of the site!) until a user explores and clicks something. Then it requires a click and a drag of minimal precision to play a song. I shouldn't have to do more than click to play a song on a music site.

always minimize the cost to perform your most common tasks
don't use interface elements just to use them, make sure they're suited for the task

No comments: