iTunes 9 is cram…
iTunes 9′s page layout feels like a step backwards in many ways: the cramped content ignores available space, displays scrollbars unnecessarily, and ellipsizes most descriptive text.
Here’s how a search for “Bramwell Tovey” looks on my desktop monitor. Two-thirds of that window is empty space, yet the tracks are shown in a fixed-height list with scrollbar.
Here’s a closer look at the content, with and without ellipsized text highlighted. Virtually every piece of descriptive text is ellipsized; Some display unellipsized tooltips on hover, others don’t.
Oh, and the scrollbar’s only 8 pixels wide.
Clicking on the album “New Music for Brass Band” reveals little detailed information about the album.
The missing details are significant enough to keep me from buying the album in fact, because they don’t let me see:
- who’s conducting
- who’s performing
- any description of the album
- close-up of the album cover (clicking that image does nothing but reload the page)
Given that everything’s ellipsized and these significant details are missing, how can customers decide whether or not to purchase the album? Maybe that Popularity column, which without apparent irony rates Album Only tracks as the least popular.
This new design is a disaster in many respects. I hope Apple fixes it soon.
Can only second that. Jobs sold it as an improvement. I think it looks horrible. No guidelines for the eye. It all dissolves into a big white. Plus the new-old candy iTunes UI this release really feels like a step back.
I’m a designer with 40 years of experience in news page, and magazine design and 18 years of experience in Web design.
It looks much better, but is not more functional or easy to use.
The new content size is designed for the tablet.
Your criticisms are not compelling. Notes are provided in some case, and presumably more notes will be made available by iTunes in the future. Also, when used on icons, “ellipsized” text is associated with a pathway to the complete text if desired. Click on the info button, and if you still find ellipses, click on the “album page” button. There always seems to be a way to “drill down” and find a complete view of the text that is initially “ellipsized.” For example, after arriving at the “album page,” letting the mouse hover above the text that is incomplete brings up a badge with the complete information. Furthermore, not everything is ellipsized as you claim. From my point of view, there seems to be a reasonable amount of information to aid the consumer. For me, the new set up makes it easier to browse rapidly and find what I want.
(Also, the scrollbar may be 8 pixels wide, but I still find that I can hit it easily with the mouse pointer. So it’s useable, and that’s really what is important. Not whether it’s only 8 or 10 or 12 pixels!)
It’s probably, amazingly enough, just the right size for a tablet screen….
Colin and senacajack, there’s little reason for the new design to favor a particular layout size to an extreme, whether the rumored tablet, the Apple TV, or whatever. Small design decisions, sure, but nothing as dramatically limiting as the redesign shows now. HTML is designed to reflow to a variety of container sizes.
Oz, I’m not saying there aren’t nice aspects to the new design, but I find your defense of the flawed aspects curious. The fact that notes are provided in some cases doesn’t help customers looking at the *other* cases. Being forced to drill down to find essential content is a classically flawed approach and is made worse when you’re unsure whether or not you’ll find that content once you’ve drilled down.
And ellipses are OK as long as you can work around the fact? What kind of design it that? How can you defend any design that would ignore copious empty space and instead ellipsize text everywhere? Even on a smaller screen those ellipses are bound to frustrate. Imagine you’re looking for an Indiana Jones movie and all you see is this:
Indiana Jones and the… [Template of Doom]
Indiana Jones and the… [Last Crusade]
Indiana Jones and the… [Crystal Skull]
There are more examples of this sort of thing than you might think. It’s particular a nuisance with classical music, where the multiple movements of symphonies and the like are generally given titles that all begin the same, like
Beethoven First Sym… [1st Movement]
Beethoven First Sym… [2nd Movement]
Beethoven First Sym… [3rd Movement]
Why should any iTunes user be forced to compensate for flawed design when HTML is specifically designed to reflow variable content without having to resort to layout tricks like ellipsizing? Blame the designer, not the user.
I love the way you wrote the blog titl…