Despite having used it now for years, I still fumble with the zoom control in the iTunes window. Here’s how the window looks when it’s not zoomed:

And here’s how it looks when “zoomed”:

See how the colored window controls are horizontal when not zoomed, but vertical when zoomed? Confuses me nearly every time.

I’m color-blind. If I stop and look carefully I can see that, yes, the “dark” one is always in the corner and the two “brighter” ones are next to the dark one, but I generally ignore the colors altogether and navigate instead by position. To find the Zoom control, I navigate by the rule that “the Zoom control is the rightmost of the three window controls.” iTunes breaks this rule when the window is zoomed.

I understand that the iTunes designers sought to differentiate the window controls from the playback controls within the deliberately cramped quarters, but this needn’t have come at the expense of such a basic UI element as the window controls. There were many other options which wouldn’t have required rotating those window controls.

As it is, I often click the Close control when I meant to click Zoom, and when the window disappears I am confused.

Color-blind drivers experience the same problem with traffic lights in the United States, but in reverse. Traffic lights are usually vertical with a top-to-bottom orientation of Stop-Caution-Go, but in some states like Texas, the traffic lights are horizontal with a left-to-right orientation of Stop-Caution-Go.

For color-blind drivers, encountering an unaccustomed orientation can be disturbing when you realize you’re not sure if Stop is on the left, or the right. It doesn’t help to say “Red means stop, and Green means Go”. Like other color-blind drivers I’ve talked to, I often can’t easily distinguish the colors and instead follow the rule, “Stop is on top, Go is on the bottom, and Caution is in-between”. This rule doesn’t work at all in Texas and other states with horizontal traffic lights.

One solution for iTunes would be to adopt different shapes for Close and Zoom. For traffic lights, different shapes for Stop and Go would also fix things. As pretty as the row of circles is, improved usability would be prettier still.

Added:
Reader Mike notes that you can mouse over the controls to see helpful icons indicating what the controls do. This is true, and these icons certainly help to distinguish Close from Zoom. But mousing over the controls like this does not address the core design flaw that color-blind users cannot by sight discern Close from Zoom. The inability to do so in turn prevents any reliable muscle memory from forming.

Imagine that you have two bottle of pills, one containing a potentially lethal substance, the other relatively harmless. The bottles look identical, except for the little labels, one of which in small print tells you bad things will happen if you take too many of the scary pills. Now imagine you need to take one of the other pills, the non-toxic ones, every hour, 16 times a day.

Having to read those small-printed labels to keep from swallowing a potentially lethal dose of the scary pills is like reading those helpful little icons that appear when you mouse over the window controls: better than nothing, but far from perfect.

Saturday, December 27th, 2008, 5:34 pm    Both comments and pings are currently closed.