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Homem 02
2010, Pencil on paper
22 x 30 cm
This is another artwork of my surreal male series. It showcases a semi-nude male with his face and genitals replaced by geometric shapes in various depths. In case you are into explanations, it's just an exercise in figure drawing with a little bit of critique to the over-hyped graphic industry today.
If you're interested in purchasing this artwork you may enquire me about it by e-mail. The original artwork and smaller copies are available.
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Homem 01
2010, Pencil on Paper
29,7 x 42 cm (A3 size)
This is another artwork of my surreal male series. It showcases a semi-nude male with his face and genitals replaced by geometric shapes in various depths. In case you are into explanations, it's just an exercise in figure drawing with a little bit of critique to the over-hyped graphic industry today.
If you're interested in purchasing this artwork you may enquire me about it by e-mail. The original artwork and smaller copies are available.
The Wolf
Pencil and dry pastels on A3 paper
Soundcloud is a wonderful service. It allows anyone to upload and share their own music online, receive comments, talk to other artists, send music to labels and recording companies and discover a lot of good music in whatever style you prefer.
It has come a long way since launch and with every update new great features are added. Even though their team has done a good job keeping these features available without bloating the graphic interface, their implementation of the on-track comments system is not the best solution. It has various shortcomings that I'll talk about next.
For now, what you need to know - if you have never visited Soundcloud - is that you can click a point on the waveform to skip to that part of the audio track, and that clicking somewhere in the blue bar at the bottom will pop up a box asking for you to add a comment to that specific point on the audio track.
Their current design, as you can see above (click the image for full size), shows comments in a little pop-up. This pop-up is triggered in two occasions: when the player "needle" (playhead) hits the comment mark (the vertical blue marks you see on top of the song's waveform) or when you roll your mouse over one of the little thumbnails that represent who wrote each comment or the relative blue mark on the waveform.
When a track has too many comments, our first problem occurs: you can't jump to precise points in the audio because of the comment marks. There is a button on the right side of the player overlaid on the bottom right of the waveform that toggles comments on and off and allows you to view and use the waveform for skipping freely, but it isn't a good solution. You are hiding one feature to make another one available and that's not a good user experience model.
The second problem is something I completely hate in software and web design: modal events. These little pop-ups jump up for your attention when you're trying to view the waveform or trying to skip to a certain point in the audio. Not only that, they have this hideous look that tries to emulate a Mac OS Dock menu (which is already hideous in Mac OS) that doesn't fit at all in Soundcloud's design.
If I designed the Soundcloud player, I would make several changes:
Remove the pop-ups completely. We can use the blue bar on the bottom to display the comments on it, they'll just load there whenever the playhead reaches a commented point. When there are no comments on the track, this bar would not show.
Replace the comment markers with small comment indicators right above the comments bar. That way you can tell where there is a comment but its marker won't keep you from being able to scrub around in the waveform looking for that certain bit you want to hear.
Improve readability by realizing that on-player comments shouldn't be long and that in all cases it is not comfortable to read long comments in such small text size (either on the original pop-ups or on the suggested comments bar). The comment boxes and threaded comments should link to their full-length counterparts on the track's page for comfortable reading.
If a comment has replies, the thumbnail pictures of the users that have replied to it are shown to the right side of the comment. Clicking one of these thumbnails will move it to the left and display the comment preview to its right, and the following commenters thumbnails will be moved to the right maintaining the chronometric order of comments from left to right.
When a comment is too long to be displayed, a "Read" button becomes available and links you to that conversation in the track's comments page where you can read it in full. If you are the author of that comment, a "Delete" button is shown as well. For elucidative reasons I made buttons with full text, but I would suggest that only the icons should be available so that the comment excerpt can be longer.
Centralize all actions in the comments bar. To add a comment, the user would click on the lower part of the waveform where the other comments markers are displayed. The light blue bar indicates the action. The user hovers the cursor over the overlaid bar until he finds the exact point to add a comment. Clicking that spot automatically changes the focus to the text field below. The user would type in his comment and when done press the "Done" button or hit the Enter/Return key on his keyboard. The "Cancel" button cancels the insertion of a comment.
This method also lets the user jump to different points of the song while writing a comment by clicking on any other parts of the waveform not covered by the blue comment overlay bar, as to compare segments of the track, for example.
There we go, now all of the actions pertinent to reading, adding and managing comments are seen in one place without the need for annoying pop-ups, nor having to mute out comments to be able to scrub around the track.
If you liked this first article or if you don't agree to it leave a comment below. If you think your software or website could use better user interface design solutions just e-mail me.
I rarely post screenshots but today my desktop seemed very pleasant. The wallpaper was created by Cookie and you can find it here. The song I'm listening to can be heard here (and I highly recommend it too).
If you're wondering why I don't use themes or custom icons, it's because I find them very distracting when I'm trying to design interfaces that fit well in the system. Yes, the dock is not the default, but then again who can use that damn default dock with so many reflections? You can find the lovely dock in IconPaper. I'd provide a direct link if the site would load for me today, hmmf.
