The two circled buttons seems to do the opposite of what would be expected… The down arrow you would expect to be the same as scroll down, but it launches into a totally different view… While the playlist button scrolls down. (same confusing issue on the android app)
When I hand my phone to someone new, they touch that down arrow, then can’t get back because they don’t know that touching the currently playing song banner is a secret UI element that takes them back to where they can get to the playlist… They end up accidently changing channels.
The scrolling up/down is a problem of it’s own on windows… If you click the playlist button, it scrolls down… Then there is no way out of that screen that I can find unless you have a scroll wheel on your mouse… Even if you have a scroll wheel, a windows user wouldn’t expect that “scroll up” = exit/back button?
Another non-intuitive element of the windows UI is that at first there seem to be no play/pause buttons… the user has to accidently discover that they are hidden by moving their mouse pointer around in frustration…
the down arrow closes the full-screen player, which lives “on top” of the rest of the app.
Tapping the mini-player anywhere but the album art restores the full-screen player.
It’s just scrolling down. You must have the ability to scroll on Windows because lots of elements require scrolling in the app (long lists, grids, etc.)
You can also resize the window vertically and they will become visible permanently.
Windows uses scroll bars because you can’t assume that a mouse has a scroll wheel. In fact, all of the lab PCs where I work (and listen to tunes) have the dirt cheap 3 button Dell mouse that comes with corp machines.
I guess I learned something today. It must not be common because it totally confounds my circle of Gen X friends.
Now that helps a lot… totally transforms the windows app for me! This is a nice surprise because I wasn’t really asking for or expecting help, I was just trying to offer constructive feedback on the UI experience of a new user since I know that you often can’t see these issues in your own product.
I too find myself putting some extra cognitive thinking, once in the fullscreen player screen, how to get back the bottom bar with the app controls.
I think too, it’s not crystal clear what the “arrow down” will do. Furthermore, once in that screen, I as a user, I don’t want to “close/minimize” the fullscreen player, but instead, I want to bring up the app control bar to access some other view/functionality.
So, instead of communicating how to close the fullscreen player, maybe it’ll be more efficient to communicate how to get back the bottom controls.
