How inconsistent design will save iTunes

"Are you the visual type of person that thrive in an environment of photos and illustrations? Or do you prefer listening to a book instead of reading it? Or do you want to touch everything to make sure you understand it?"

This is a watered-down restatement of the "learning styles" theory from educational psychology that, while almost never stated explicitly or coherently, is the view that different people have particular preferences for either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning and interaction, and that these learning style preferences are more or less stable over time. The usual implication is that if you determine what a person's "style" is, you can adapt whatever you're trying to teach them to incorporate their preferred medium, and they will learn better than if you used, say, a visual lesson with an auditory learner.

Despite its frequent repetition as fact in lay sources like this one, the learning styles theory has never been substantiated by scientific research. Assessments of learning styles show no predictive validity for individual differences in response to instructional methods intended to focus one style or another. Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes, "After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that VAK, or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits."

"Learning styles" is bunk, and casually repeating it as though it were an established mainstream theory is doing a disservice to science.

[End of slightly off-topic rant]

Microsoft Office used to have a UI that would do this. It was always the very first setting I'd change, disabling the feature. And Microsoft eventually discovered that it caused more confusion than it solved: people remembered seeing a command somewhere, but couldn't relocate it because it had been hidden.

Perhaps Microsoft's implementation could have been smarter, but I believe that they successfully demonstrated that this approach does not have merit.

This is like those dancing menus Office used to have, except even worse, because it lowers the discoverability of advanced functions just as you're getting to the stage where you'd be more likely to use them.

I prefer the Kathy Sierra idea that your program should make your users feel like "I am so smart", not "this program is so smart." Hiding stuff that you JUST KNOW you saw one time makes the user feel stupid.

Which is a shame, really, because there aren't a whole lot of alternatives out there for OS X.

The idea of the growing search box is interesting, but what about one that kind of decays? It begins to shrink without usage until it reaches some point and then disappears. A good metaphor would be muscles, use them and they grow, don't lose them and they atrophy. I think non-IT oriented folk should be able to work out whats going on with enough visual cues. Especially if it becomes a common enough concept in software.

Edit: clarified a few things

If this site was like this, realizing that I read the whole comment thread before commenting and moving the comment box to the bottom of the page for me, it would be frustrating because I would sometimes scroll up and think I was logged out, etc. (Big problem even when people accidentally remove UI elements from a program such as safari by dragging them off the toolbar.)

Performance increases will save iTunes. Not this horrendous "smart UI" idea.

I hate being so harsh in a comment, and feel mean for writing it. But iTunes is one of the worst programs I use on a regular basis (I have an iPhone) and practically dread using it, to the point where I don't sync my phone as often as I'd like just to avoid the kludge. It makes my 2.4GHz MBP feel slow. Nothing else makes it feel slow. They desperately need to rewrite this, and I'm all for a radical UI change too - even if it was quick, I don't find it a pleasure to use. It feels distinctly un-apple.

Sorry, but this isn't a good idea. iTunes actually wouldn't be half bad if they permitted addons, theming and official support for MTP/MSC. However, inconsistant UI's are a big no-no according to the lecturer who taught me GUI design, because users have to continue learning and cannot rely on elements existing where they expect them.

Just my 2cents though.

E.g. I have one computer that I bring out maybe once a month at parties. It should not think: "Okay, he hasn't used these playlists for a month, we can hide them." Some computers are also shared between many users (using the same account), so the adaptation logic would have to somehow realize that. And so on.

I think Apple is wise in not trying to do something like this until it can be done right. When it's done right, the user will never even realize it. Everything will just seem even smoother and simpler than before.

Why not suggest a playlist with songs you listen to the most instead of making the searchbox bigger? Why not suggest songs to listen to next instead of hiding the genius bar?

> "I believe that it’s a healthy way of loosing control."

Got a problem with incontinence? Keep it to yourself.