5 ms·

Oh boy, we're redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we've seen. 0. A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we'

• GuiA 7y ago
  > to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying) And it took a lot of time... Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees. Would love to see the work!
  • mumblemumble 7y ago
    Agreed, telemetry is a classic case of "more data is not better data". With a smaller number of organized sessions, you can still collect telemetry (without spying), and you can also collect all sorts of information that telemetry just won't give you. I suspect that a hands-on approach can be cheaper, too. It's just not any fun because it doesn't give you an excuse to play with your company's Snowflake warehouse.
    • thfuran 7y ago
      I think there are certain things that are hard to achieve without telemetry. Like answering the question of "how many users will finally remove (hopefully) deprecated feature X affect?" or "Does anyone actually use this on platform Y?"
• jackewiehose 7y ago
  > we're redesigning VLC interface those days why?
  • eitland 7y ago
    Because they want to I guess. As for why they want to one obvious reason might be that the saw potential to improve it. Kind of a weird comment, but honestly I think these are the best reasons for why a volunteer driven open source project should do anything to their ux.
    • jbk 7y ago
      > Because they want to I guess. Because users are asking us to.
      • eitland 7y ago
        Users asked for good changes and developers wanted to do what the users wanted? Even better!
  • pessimizer 7y ago
    I've never found it very usable, which I find sad because the functionality is so good. It's always been my last resort when nothing else would work, but never my first resort.
  • jbk 7y ago
    > why? Because this is the now main complaint we receive and because the usages are changing. But we will do our best so that the people who just use the basic player don’t have much changes for them.
    • rnd0 7y ago
      Hello -and thank you. VLC is one of my favorite must-have programs, and I use it almost daily. I do have a request. If at all possible, please make it possible to continue using the current UI and keyboard shortcuts as an alternative. I like trying new things (skins or whatever) but I like being able to revert to the UI I'm familiar with too.
• dooglius 7y ago
  > we don't use telemetry/spying Thank you for respecting user privacy, I'm sure the temptation to get more data is strong.
• ssivark 7y ago
  I think this might make fantastic fodder for discussion -- both the actual design, and the process of going about the redesign in an organization like the VLC project. A blog post, maybe?
  • jbk 7y ago
    When we are finished maybe.
• pier25 7y ago
  > a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work Good things rarely are produced with a "design by committee" process.
  • jbk 7y ago
    > Good things rarely are produced with a "design by committee" process. Technical design of the VLC core is done a small number of people and we've always found consensus without bloat. But for design, you are correct.
    • pier25 7y ago
      I'm not sure a small number of like-minded people could be considered a committee though.
      • jbk 7y ago
        Agreed. But for design, even 10 people is sometimes too much :)
• cheesedoodle 7y ago
  Please do share the work!
  • jbk 7y ago
    Mail me.
• bityard 7y ago
  As a daily user of VLC, I just want to say: I only use about 10% of what it can do but I can pretty much guarantee that _my_ 10% of feature coverage doesn't match anyone else's.
  • jbk 7y ago
    This is the biggest issue we have. People use VLC for various different things, from DVD playback to audio media library to audiobooks or professional QA. Not everyone has the same needs.
    • WhatIsDukkha 7y ago
      The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC. If all you see is "growing" the userbase by nuking and reworking the user interface what happens to us your existing users? As a direct example - I use VLC primarily as a music player for my jazz album collection. It handles many formats I throw at it. It has a simple playlist (I play albums from start to finish and do not value a lot of spazzy track selection features). I have a nice useable interface that works well. I ignore the stuff I don't need, I know WHERE the stuff I do need is. I use VLC because it doesn't change much year to year unlike the vast majority of flash in the pan music players that go in and out of fashion. If you privilege growth of new users you don't care that I know where things are and how to make them work. You just reorganize things according to some "designer" that is entirely growth oriented and doesn't care about me.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        > The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC. Depending on usecase, it's quite possible that current users are successfully using it but could have a much easier time of things with some UI tweaks. It's dangerous, yes, but it can be favorable overall.
      • jbk 7y ago
        (I really don't understand this comment, nor the tone that I perceive as quite aggressive, but I may just misunderstand it. So answering anyway) > The unspoken "problem" you have is that your existing users are doing just fine with VLC. Some of them yes, some are complaining. Quite many, in fact. > If all you see is "growing" the userbase by nuking and reworking the user interface what happens to us your existing users? We're just working so that it still works for our existing users, that's exactly the point of my previous comment. It will require, at some places, to have some options, for contradictory use-cases; but mostly, we will try to support everything that we did, just simplify some cases (changes of subtitles or audio for example, chromecast or access to video effect), and provide a media library to people who listen to a lot of audio. > I use VLC primarily as a music player for my jazz album collection. It handles many formats I throw at it. It has a simple playlist (I play albums from start to finish and do not value a lot of spazzy track selection features). It should absolutely still work. If it does not work as before, just tell us why and we will fix. I can even send you some early designs, if you are scared. We are in no hurry, so we'll do well. It just requires more time, which is what we have :) > If you privilege growth of new users you don't care Who talked about growth? We're talking about VLC! We don't make any money by having more users, on the contrary. We just want our users to be more happy.
• ash 7y ago
  Thank you for doing it! VLC is great piece of software. However, I struggle with its UI almost every time I use it. Simple things are hard to find: * switch subtitle track * add external subtitles * switch soundtrack * add external soundtrack It's also annoying that rewind buttons in full-screen mode and in windowed mode behave very differently.
  • jbk 7y ago
    Mail me and I'll show you the new player. You'll tell me what you think about those.
  • magduf 7y ago
    One thing that bites me from time to time: if I run VLC from the command line with a media file as the argument, but I screw up and don't enter a valid filename (easy to do with tab-completion, with multiple files matching and then accidentally hitting Enter before completing the name), then VLC starts up and goes bonkers. I have to switch back to my terminal window and Ctrl-C to shut it down.
    • jbk 7y ago
      This is fixed, since a few versions.
• noname120 7y ago
  > we don't use telemetry/spying Telemetry can perfectly be done in a privacy-conscious way. Getting real user feedback is paramount, but telemetry is super important as well because it has a scale that you can't achieve just by asking users.
  • generationP 7y ago
    What would you hope to learn from telemetry on a video player? Stats on the use of specific features? Formats? Codecs? Errors? I'm wondering if it's worth the hassle. Each of these is nontrivial if you really want to be privacy-conscious. Data can easily identify porn watchers, pirates, possibly journalists in conflict zones... and police only has to say cheese pizza to get all the logs.
    • jbk 7y ago
      Most non-open source players and codecs do that, btw. It is insane. In the case of VLC, telemetry would help to know which options are used the most and which ones are not. It could help knowing which menus are never accessed. Besides that, no idea.
• generationP 7y ago
  From a non-power user: I'd love to see the handling of subtitles becoming a bit more intuitive, specifically as to syncing them with the movie. Ideally, I'd match a sentence in the movie to the same sentence in the subtitles instead of having to iteratively mess with the delay so that the subtitles fit. And thanks for the great tool!
  • jbk 7y ago
    This is in VLC. And there is a UI tool to do that in next release.
    • generationP 7y ago
      Great!
• spookybones 7y ago
  I love VLC. Thank you. That is all.
• catalogia 7y ago
  > Geek/Pro options can be further away. If you take that to the extreme it becomes disrespectful and you'll lose those users to competitors who don't treat them as second (or third) class users. A concrete example is controlling the player over a unix socket. A "geek/pro" feature to be sure, which VLC and mpv both have support for. mpv provides clear documentation of this feature while VLC provides next to zero documentation of this feature's existence, let alone how it actually works. As a "geek/pro" user, the choice between vlc and mpv couldn't be more clear. The former seems to pay lip service to UX while the later, despite promising little in the way of UX polish, actually delivers a more polished experience for anybody who might want to use these sort of features.
  • jbk 7y ago
    Controlling the player over a unix socket is not a UI feature, almost by definition. And the rest is lack of documentation, and sure our documentation sucks, but that is far from the question here.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      I disagree, these unix sockets are user interfaces, albeit not graphical user interfaces. I am a user who's trying to interface with these players, what could these be other than user interfaces? And unfortunately 'lack of documentation' is putting it lightly. VLC's barebones manpage directs users to https://www.videolan.org/doc/ https://www.videolan.org/doc/, which in turn says the documentation doesn't exist and gives the user another link to a wiki. If you dig around on the wiki you can eventually find this brief acknowledgement of the interface in question: https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfaces/#RC.2C_Telnet https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Alternative_Interfac... Documentation is part of the user experience (who is documentation for, if not for the users?), and in this regard VLC is very poor. I think this relates to VLC treating technically inclined users like second or third class users.
      • jbk 7y ago
        Documentation is off-topic here, but we're rewriting the documentation currently here: https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html https://docs.videolan.me/vlc-user/3.0/en/index.html
• terminaljunkid 7y ago
  At least on Android, VLC UX is quite professional-ish. I never had a problem with finding something. Maybe because I am power user. But my non-poweruser friends are also happy with VLC.
  • jbk 7y ago
    Because we did the work of UX/UI on Android, not on Windows.
• flukus 7y ago
  Are you looking at how you preserve the preferences too? I neither love nor hate the UI, which probably means it does a good job of getting out the way, but my one bug bear is things like when I turn off sub-titles they get re-added on the next video.
  • jbk 7y ago
    > Are you looking at how you preserve the preferences too? Yes, per media preferences for subs and filter.