[Usability] A few ideas to improve searches in Rhythmbox

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

Hi

Here are a few ideas I submitted to bugzilla.gnome.org
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131544) about Rhythmbox, but
never got any comment. So I decided to forward them here, hoping that it
could get more attention:

Watching my friends use Rhythmbox on my computer, I noticed that the
current search interface can be confusing in 2 common scenarii:

 1st one:

- You are looking for a song using the browser.
- You set the artist/album but can't find the song in the (filtered) list
- You then try using the search dialog

In this scenario, the search will fail because the user forgot to reset the
filters to all artists/all albums. I saw that happening a lot (always
actually) when other people used rhythmbox.

My proposition would be to automatically reset the artist/album filters
when you perform a new search. But I guess some people wouldn't like it...

So another solution would be to have the following UI:

Search [        ] among |songs from [name of the artist]|
                        |songs from [name of the album] |
                        |all songs                      |

 2nd one:

- You are looking for a song named "Penny Lane" using the search field
- You found your song and play it
- You then click on an artist in the artist list (for example "Madonna")

In this scenario, nothing appears in the song list because the user forgot
to reset the search (by selecting "Penny Lane" and pressing DEL). And as
Madonna never sang Penny Lane (AFAIK), nothing appears.

My proposition would be simply blank the search field when changing the
artist or the album filter.

What do you think of those propositions ?

-- 
Julien Olivier <julo altern org>