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I agree with the conclusion, but would like to add that it should be obvious what the current state is, and what the state will change to when the toggle is cha

I agree with the conclusion, but would like to add that it should be obvious what the current state is, and what the state will change to when the toggle is changed; too often I have to change it in order to work out that I didn't need to change it. The point about play/pause is really interesting because it goes against the conclusion. However, it's following physical precedent that's well understood. It's also (usually) obvious when music or a movie is playing, so the button icon wouldn't even need to change for the user to understand what pressing it will do. This stands it separately to the toggle question, I think. Back to toggles and UIs, changing the colour of the toggle from light grey to slightly lighter grey is unhelpful in the extreme. Give me labels. If labels don't fit your motif then get better designers.

Fluorescence 3y ago
> However, it's following physical precedent that's well understood The physical precedent would be to show the behaviour as the button image (play) and then the depressed/undepressed visual state would show if the behaviour was active or not. Software designers didn't follow this and invented swapping between the play/pause icons causing this new confusion. Not for any user friendly reason, more because skeuomorphic 3d buttons went out of fashion. > It's also (usually) obvious The only virtue of indicating the state at all is for when you have a problem. Very common for audio at least (muted sound, unplugged headphones, linux audio drivers have become borked again... sigh). I still get that twang of cognitive dissonance when I see play/pause buttons and have to think about it and might just double toggle it anyway when I've got an issue because I can't be 100% sure what a pause button means.
chatmasta 3y ago
> it should be obvious what the current state is Yeah, I don't need to know which direction of my light switch means "on" (and in fact I don't know), because I can see whether the lights are on.
- xamde 3y ago
  Unless there is an issue with either the light source or the power source. Muted/unmuted is also a pair where unmuted often does not equal "we can hear you"
crazygringo 3y ago
> Give me labels. If labels don't fit your motif then get better designers. That's unhelpful and unreasonable, particularly on mobile. There's no room on Spotify for labels behind every button, for instance. Not if you want room to show the cover art, which I do. It's not a question about "better designers" -- space constraints are real, and sometimes you really need things available at a single tap. I don't want shuffle to be buried behind a pop-up menu.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  have you tried to use spotify with a screen reader lately?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Not being vision-impaired, no. Can you elaborate what your point is, since not having done so, I can't begin to guess?
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  I just opened Spotify on my iPhone mini, just to check, and I really have to disagree. Spotify has TONS of wasted space. Even when you do want to pull up the "extra" menus (which is frequent for me, since it seems like that's the only place to get to the album for a given song), they practically throw the space away. The hamburger menu can only fit two items on its list of 10, because they waste so much space. I'm sorry, but 10 options can easily all be visible simultaneously while still showing the current context of that menu (the song). But that ethos abounds. They hid all the controls, and make many of the controls that they do show ambiguous. Am I going to be shuffle-play on the queue? Is my queue currently autogenerating songs at its end or is it going to stop at the end of queue? And long presses / hovers provide zero extra information for what the unlabeled buttons mean / do. I'm pretty satisfied with Spotify UI on the whole, mostly because of how easy they make it to toss the currently playing song around to different devices and they handle shared control well, but I do wish it didn't require three taps and a scroll (in a context where it's not even obvious that scrolling is possible, because the list is so sparse that it doesn't look like there are any more items at the end) to get to an album, which is almost always the context in which I want to listen to a search result.

Fluorescence 3y ago

> However, it's following physical precedent that's well understood The physical precedent would be to show the behaviour as the button image (play) and then the depressed/undepressed visual state would show if the behaviour was active or not. Software designers didn't follow this and invented swapping between the play/pause icons causing this new confusion. Not for any user friendly reason, more because skeuomorphic 3d buttons went out of fashion. > It's also (usually) obvious The only virtue of indicating the state at all is for when you have a problem. Very common for audio at least (muted sound, unplugged headphones, linux audio drivers have become borked again... sigh). I still get that twang of cognitive dissonance when I see play/pause buttons and have to think about it and might just double toggle it anyway when I've got an issue because I can't be 100% sure what a pause button means.

chatmasta 3y ago

> it should be obvious what the current state is Yeah, I don't need to know which direction of my light switch means "on" (and in fact I don't know), because I can see whether the lights are on.

xamde 3y ago
Unless there is an issue with either the light source or the power source. Muted/unmuted is also a pair where unmuted often does not equal "we can hear you"

crazygringo 3y ago

> Give me labels. If labels don't fit your motif then get better designers. That's unhelpful and unreasonable, particularly on mobile. There's no room on Spotify for labels behind every button, for instance. Not if you want room to show the cover art, which I do. It's not a question about "better designers" -- space constraints are real, and sometimes you really need things available at a single tap. I don't want shuffle to be buried behind a pop-up menu.

sitzkrieg 3y ago
have you tried to use spotify with a screen reader lately?
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Not being vision-impaired, no. Can you elaborate what your point is, since not having done so, I can't begin to guess?
IggleSniggle 3y ago
I just opened Spotify on my iPhone mini, just to check, and I really have to disagree. Spotify has TONS of wasted space. Even when you do want to pull up the "extra" menus (which is frequent for me, since it seems like that's the only place to get to the album for a given song), they practically throw the space away. The hamburger menu can only fit two items on its list of 10, because they waste so much space. I'm sorry, but 10 options can easily all be visible simultaneously while still showing the current context of that menu (the song). But that ethos abounds. They hid all the controls, and make many of the controls that they do show ambiguous. Am I going to be shuffle-play on the queue? Is my queue currently autogenerating songs at its end or is it going to stop at the end of queue? And long presses / hovers provide zero extra information for what the unlabeled buttons mean / do. I'm pretty satisfied with Spotify UI on the whole, mostly because of how easy they make it to toss the currently playing song around to different devices and they handle shared control well, but I do wish it didn't require three taps and a scroll (in a context where it's not even obvious that scrolling is possible, because the list is so sparse that it doesn't look like there are any more items at the end) to get to an album, which is almost always the context in which I want to listen to a search result.