Re: [Usability] New Sound Preferences and Volume Control

[Andy Owen <andy-gnome-usability ultra-premium com>]

On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 22:39 -0800, Kirk Bridger wrote:
> Thanks Andy, great points.
> 
> I think we have a basic question here that nobody is really asking:
> are users going to want to adjust volume per app?  Yes, I know some of
> us may, but would users really use it?

It is a good question to ask, but answering it is a bit subtle. The
problem is that until recently, no mainstream OS has had the sound
system powerful enough to manage the volume for individual applications.
As a result, people have been trained to think that volume settings must
be done the way they are done now. 

The other thing is that many of our applications already have a volume
slider, but I haven't seen anyone proposing, or even considering
removing them. Doing things the way I've described would mean that those
applications with their own volume slider could be made consistent with
each other (since they would all have the exact same volume controls).
So from that perspective, it isn't really changing the existing
functionality.

> 
> I'd be curious about Vista's experience with it - Vista can do this,
> can't it?

I've never used it, but this:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Windows-Vista-Volume-Mixer-41882.shtml

Has a picture of their mixer. I'm not sure what happens when you run an
application twice (say two movie players). 


> 
> I think right now pulse audio lets me do it, and I like the idea, but
> man is it a lot of work to make adjustments to all those volume
> sliders.  it's much easier to just stick with what is set right now
> and adjust the dial on my speakers, seriously.

I used to use the dial on my speakers, so I know exactly where you are
coming from. My current method of working is to only adjust the master
volume, by putting my mouse over its icon and using the wheel. This is
really convenient and responsive. If I have music playing and I'm
watching something on youtube, I will pause the music player - most of
the time this is not what I actually wanted to do, as I typically want
to turn down the volume of either the video or the music. The best thing
for my case would be to have an icon in the title bar of the application
that I could just mouse-wheel over to adjust things.


> That's not to say we shouldn't give them the ability to tweak of
> course, nor does it mean there couldn't be some presets, but this all
> feels somewhat like we're building a solution to a problem that nobody
> really is interested in solving.

I'm all for usability tests (though I suck at designing them). But if
someone can design a test that doesn't suffer from the problems I talked
about before, then that would be very interesting. I'm just nervous that
we'll end up doing a test in such a way that we never get anything new,
because people don't even realise that things are possible.

Andy