Spotify mobile UI: the “available offline” toggle

Spotify is an essential service. It’s usurped iTunes as far as I’m concerned – I no longer sync any music to my iPhone. Music I want to look up in a whim is instantly available, playlists sync across my work and home computers, as well as my mobile devices. It’s convenient and wonderful.

But there is always this vague nagging sense of insecurity over my playlists that iTunes never gave me. I rely on a wifi connection to listen to music, or the ability to sync music to make it available offline. Thankfully, Spotify has the latter feature.

Frighteningly, this important feature can be toggled in a clumsy split second:

The effect is instant. I’ve stood gutted on the treadmill watching a playlist become unplayable because I hit the button by accident.

I’m not sure why it’s a toggle. If I’ve decided a playlist should be available offline, it shouldn’t be that easy to reverse the decision, especially if syncing over a connection is involved – especially on mobile Spotify, where it’s difficult to predict my location, and if I’m listening to my iPhone I’m almost certainly not in an office with a good wifi connection. I definitely don’t need to see a button for it every time I load my Starred playlist.

I doubt Spotify has tested this with users. This is a small thing that really affects my enjoyment of the service.

Contributing to this problem: a recent update to the mobile app has broken syncing. In a previous update, toggling online/offline would instantly begin the syncing process for making music available offline, but now songs only become available once I’ve played them (usually over a mobile data connection).

Fix it

  1. Keep the toggle, but add a confirmation screen as a safety net
  2. Keep the toggle, but allow some time to pass before activating the changes (in the scenario the toggle is hit by accident, it can be changed with no effect)
  3. Put the option for changing offline availability elsewhere
  4. Sync all my music at once when I’m connected to wifi

Please fix it, Spotify!

Quotes from ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’

Some favourite quotes from Richard Dawkins, ‘The Ancestor’s Tale‘. Dawkins is known for militant secularism. This has unfortunately eclipsed his science writing about evolution, which is brilliant, accessible and illuminating.

On being unfinished:

A living creature is always in the business of surviving in its own environment. It is never unfinished – or, in another sense, it is always unfinished. So, presumably, are we.

On the K-T extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs:

The noise of the impact, thundering round the planet at a thousand kilometres per hour, probably deafened every living creature not burned by the blast, suffocated by the wind-shock, drowned by the 150-metre tsunami that raced around the literally boiling sea, or pulverised by an earthquake a thousand times more violent than the largest ever dealt by the San Andreas fault. And that was just the immediate cataclysm. Then there was the aftermath – the global forest fires, the smoke and dust and ash which blotted out the sun in a two-year nuclear winter that killed off most of the plants and stopped dead the world’s food chains.

Dawkins’ post-Armageddon vision:

If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside. When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them.

On mudskippers:

They also take in oxygen through the skin, which has to be kept moist. If a mudskipper is in danger of drying out, it will roll about in a puddle. Their eyes are especially vulnerable to dryness, and they sometimes wipe them with a wet fin. The eyes bulge close together near the top of the head, where, as with frogs and crocodiles, they can be used as periscopes to see above the surface when the fish is underwater. When out on land, a mudskipper will frequently withdraw its bulging eyes into their sockets to moisten them.

New York impressions

I visited New York last week. I rented a room on airbnb (great deal: £294 for 6 nights) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; an interesting area full of artists and hipsters, the cousin of the Mission in San Francisco and Shoreditch in London. It’s also central, being just two subway stops from Manhattan.

Staying in an airbnb apartment is odd. It’s an impersonal transaction where you pay for the space, yet it’s much more personal and much less private than a hotel. I’m a fan of the anonymity, impersonality, privacy of hotels, so this was out of my comfort zone. That said, I’d do it again, but I’d read the reviews thoroughly.

My host was completely fine. The problem was the shape of the apartment: though I had my own entrance, there was another door from my room into my host’s bedroom. There was also generous window high up at the top of the room, connecting our rooms. This meant when my host’s bedroom light was on, it’d also light up my room. (Making this an actual problem was that my host liked to keep the lights on in his room all night. Maybe he thought I was dangerous?)

Brunch was one of my favourite things about Williamsburg. I had brunch at Egg in Williamsburg twice. They do a dish called Eggs Rothko, which is easy-cooked egg on a slice of brioche, covered with cheddar (photo). I wanted to go to Parish Hall, but sadly didn’t get around to it. I strongly appreciate that brunch is a proper thing that people take seriously in New York. If I’d stayed longer in Williamsburg, I’d have tried all the recommended places.

I bought a week MTA pass for about $30, and quickly figured out how to get from Williamsburg to Manhattan. It’s not easy to spot the subway entrances in the city, which are pretty unmissable in London as street furniture that help you find your way around. I noticed that an average subway crowd in New York is better preened and better dressed (sorry London, but it’s true), and manicures seem to be as basic as salon haircuts. These are some of the shallow observations you make during a week in a new city.

The New York grid is much more egalitarian than London’s sprawl, which has pros and cons. Central Park is an obvious visual focal point, and the surrounding avenues and streets. The advantage of the grid is that you can meet at intersections, and if you look left or right while crossing an avenue, you can see stunning views across Manhattan. Because the lines of the map tended to be equal, it was much less obvious to me where I should go first.

Service in New York was sometimes unfriendly. I don’t mean neutral, but actually grumpy and sour. It was clearer to me who hated their jobs. I had a glare from a barista in Williamsburg while she was taking my order for coffee. (I’m advised this is a phenomenon in Williamsburg, where everyone is working on their novels, and see their barista or bar job as beneath them.) I had a funny run-in with a waiter on the Upper East Side, while out with an old colleague. The waiter handed us a garbled receipt with a total that seemed high. I asked him to explain the items on the receipt, which he didn’t appeciate. He ended an unhelpful explanation with a curt “BYE-BYE!”.

I think New York would be an amazing place to live as a young and single person. (Dating, I’m told, is much more of a structured “thing” than it is in London, where it exists in a sort of embarrassed, apologetic purgatory of not-really-any-rules). There are amazing social and professional opportunities, many exceptional restaurants and cheap places for brunch, parks, museums, galleries. I loved MoMA. There are unique venues like Barcade in Brooklyn, where I’d go all the time.

But I was happy to come home. Coming home felt smoother and more pleasant and friendly than the entry to the US. I have a heightened appreciation for things like the clear and easy station signage at Heathrow and Paddington, the maze-like streets, the unpolished people riding the tube.

Africa weekend notes

The Cradle of Humankind

I visited Maropeng last Saturday with a couple of Fjord colleagues. The museum is a decent introduction to human evolution, but I was disappointed that there weren’t more actual fossils on display. Unfortunately there was no time to visit Sterkfontein cave (where Mrs. Ples was discovered).

Pilanesberg Nature Reserve

We stayed in Rustenberg overnight, leaving early in the morning to see the sunrise.

Spotting animals at Pilanesberg is a game of luck. Binoculars would have been a good idea. But we were incredibly lucky: we spotted an elephant within the first 10 minutes, and continued to see, in no particular order:

  • blue wildebeest
  • zebra
  • warthogs
  • a dinosaur-like secretary bird
  • a hippo
  • giraffes
  • elephants

Here are my favourite photos in vague chronological order:

 

(See video of turtles crawling on the hippo’s back)

Exhibition: Light Show, Hayward Gallery

30 January – 28 April 2013
Hayward Gallery
Tickets: about £11 (here)

I saw some photos from this exhibition in a newspaper, and knew I had to go. Here’s the full list of artists in the exhibition.

Humans often project emotions on the weather and vice versa: an overcast day is “gloomy”, and someone’s positive attitude can be “sunny”. Lighting can completely transform the mood and feeling of a space, and it’s explored beautifully in this exhibition, which can be appreciated emotionally and intuitively as well as mentally.

Some of my favourites from yesterday’s visit to the Hayward Gallery:

Slow Arc inside a Cube IV (2009) by Conrad Shawcross

I spent ten minutes sitting in this room:

It sort of sent me and other visitors into a meditative state; other visitors would come in and also sit down and just watch. It’s like sitting under a tree in the summer and watching the shadows move with the wind.

Conrad Shawcross describes the work as “a metaphor for the discipline of science”, and his sculptures explore interests such as “physics and metaphysics, biology, geometry, philosophy and cosmology”.

“The work involves a complex play of moving light and shadows and owes its generis to an anecdote about the immensely complicated process of of mapping the molecular structure of insulin by means of crystal radiography, a feat achieved by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin.”


Chromosaturation (1965–2013) by Carlo Cruz-Diez

This “creates a space where colour acts with all its force on the spectator’s skin, objects and surrounding wall surfaces”. Colour is a situation:

“Since the retina usually perceives a wide range of colours simultaneously, experiencing these monochromatic situations causes disturbances. This activates and awakens the notions of colour in the viewer, who becomes aware of colour’s material and physical existence.”

 



Magic Hour, by David Batchelor

“Magic hour is named for the extraordinary spectacle of light – a mix of sunset colours and the glow from artificial lights – that transforms the twilight sky above Las Vegas.”


On carousels

Some interesting comments and data related to carousels, the popular mechanism for rotating content on a webpage:

“Carousels are organizational crutches“. Nobody can decide what content is most important, so a carousel is a weak and lazy crowd-pleaser:

“It’s far harder to have an honest content strategy conversation and determine what truly deserves to be on the homepage.”

The most compelling argument not to use one is that carousels are just not that effective: Erik Runyon’s data shows that carousels don’t get interacted with that much.

Sketching

I love sketching! A new set of requirements is a problem (or multiple problems) to solve. It might seem intimidating, confusing or indecipherable at first, but you can start to tackle the problem by sketching it.

A sketch isn’t a deliverable — it’s a method for clarifying a problem and beginning to solve it. It’s a way of thinking. I sketch on post-it notes, scrap paper, fancy Moleskine paper, and recently my iPad. iPad is convenient because I can email myself (and other people) copies, and send them directly to a printer. Also, it’s really easy to add colour. One thing I like about sketching on Paper app (with my Bamboo stylus) is the watercolour brush.

But all you need is a biro. And some scrap paper. You definitely don’t need an iPad.

If sketching feels intimidating, or if you just want to read a good article, I encourage you to read Paul Annett’s article on sketching to communicate, an accessible way to start sketching. The definitive book is almost certainly Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences.

Design fluency

Writing, like design, is a process of refinement. Last month I wrote about design fluency and prototyping for 24 Ways. In this article I suggest using Keynote for lightweight and quick prototypes.

The tool doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re constantly questioning, refining, iterating. There’ll be many inputs, including your intellect and experience as a designer, colleagues’ input, client’s input, and users’ input. The trick is to remain focused through all of this material. And iterate.

It’s comforting to remember that few designers reach an groundbreaking and elegant solution on first try. (First thought, first sketch, first whatever.) Elegance is reached by iteration, and by discarding solutions that aren’t good enough. Prototyping is part of this process and makes it fun.

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

Place and identity

Ten years ago, I was a student in an English school studying English literature and poetry. I didn’t enjoy school very much, but this was my favourite class. We were studying Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet. His work is about peat and bogmen and Irish history, and a major theme running through his work is how identity is connected with place.

The whole class was asked to submit a piece of writing that discussed place and identity from our personal points of view; how our homes and cities and countries have influenced or given shape to our sense of identity. Seventeen year old me was disdainful and irritated by the assignment. In my essay I argued that Oxford, the city I grew up in, is irrelevant to my sense of identity. I didn’t feel any particular attachment to my city or even country. I felt a greater belonging to ideas and humanity, in a kind of mental and immaterial way.

Eventually I adopted a more rounded view. I’m a product of my environment: brought up in an English family in an English city and attending English schools, influenced by English newspapers and books and TV and TV ads. But since I was 12, the internet has been another strong and influential input into my culture. It’s changed how I think, formed a large part of my education outside of schools and universities, given me the focus for my career, and provided some of the strongest social relationships just online and in the real world too. My tribe seemingly has no physical location. Ten years later there’s still a sense of belonging to another facet of culture and society that has no land.

Tim Hunkin’s arcade machines

Over Christmas my family stayed in Southwold, a small and picturesque seaside town in Suffolk. Adnams brewery has a very strong presence in Southwold, which is the town’s main employer – naturally, their beer is available everywhere, and even beach cleaning is sponsored by Adnams.

It’s also famous for tiny, colourful, yet prohibitively expensive beach huts, which line the seafront:

The highlight of the trip: we made an interesting discovery on Southwold Pier, which hosts the Under the Pier show. It’s a hut full of arcade machines, but instead of your usual slot machines, it features some rather awesome and strange arcade machine curiosities from the ’90s, created by the inventor and artist Tim Hunkin.

Crankenstien [sic] (doesn’t seem to be featured on the website). This was a box containing a prisoner, and you had to crank a handle until the prisoner comes back to life with a scream. You’re sort of expecting something scary to happen, but it’s still quite a shocking experience, defying your intellectual capabilities.

Test your Nerve. A dog in a box with bars comes to life when you reach into its cage to hold down a button. The longer you hold the button, the more drooly and disgusting the dog gets. If you wait long enough the dog barks. Shockingly.

Autofrisk. We didn’t have the guts to try this, but there’s a video available of how the Autofrisk machine works. It’s a machine that simulates being frisked.

Gene forecaster. You place a hair in a tray and the machine predicts your future, providing a physical output: a fortune cookie. (What sounded like fun and crazy science fiction in the 20th century is closer to reality in the 21st, with affordable genome sequencing.)

Microbreak. A machine that simulates a holiday for £1. I didn’t try this one, but it sounds like a great idea: “Simply sit on the chair and the carpet tips and rocks as you watch a TV animation of your flight and coach transfer, ending up on a tropical beach. At this point the TV lamp swings up, shining a heat lamp in your face. After soaking in the heat, you’re whisked home again, the whole experience lasting less than 3 minutes.”

The rest of the machines are brilliant, too. Tim Hunkin seems to be an interesting guy.