Hi all,
I’ve just downloaded Volumio2 and I’m loving it! It mostly works just as I want it to work and it turns out my old RPi 1B can be put to a sensible use again, yay!
Anyway, what I find irritating in the UI: the desktop and mobile sites have the buttons in opposite locations. The playback buttons are at top on desktop site, and at bottom on mobile site. Since the sites just switch instantly when one resizes the window, I often see either of them on the same device. This leads to a inconsistent experience, I start moving the mouse up, only to discover that my buttons are at the bottom this time.
I propose to unify the interface and keep the mobile set up: function switcher at top, playback buttons at bottom. It seems more natural that way.
When I saw your post I started to agree with you in my mind, consistency is good thing. But when I tested both interfaces myself (especially mobile version - of course on phone) I would not say that unifying them would be good in this case.
On mobile it is much easier to adjust volume, change track, play/pause when buttons are at the bottom of the screen, they are easier to reach by your thumb. On desktop they shouldn’t be placed at the bottom, because users “read” the screen from left to right and top to bottom and I suppose that those buttons are most important and most used by them. And moreover they are not so big and could get lost if they were at the bottom (especially on big screens). Maybe placing them at the middle would somehow resolve that dilemma, but then it would not look so clean…
Maybe there is any other (“more accurate”) way to decide which version should be presented to the user? (so there would be no problem with window resizing on desktop.) Or devs could make a checkbox/switch to always display the mobile version only?
We’ve studied a lot the best usability scenarios for both desktop and mobile, and in the end we found out that 2 different UI’s were the best solution. The reasons were explained very good by Chipl…
It mostly works just as I want it to work and it turns out my old RPi 1B can be put to a sensible use again, yay!