Re: [Usability] Usability Digest, Vol 56, Issue 16

["Jacob Beauregard" <deadowlsurvivor gmail com>]

On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 14:03 -0500, Philip Ganchev wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:35 AM, Dokuro <dario soto gmail com> wrote:
> > ... lots of people use the master
> > volume control (seating next of the notification area) with the mouse
> > wheel; ...
>
> And those who have a hardware volume knob usually don't bother with
> the software control.

I'm not so sure about that. It is typically much more convenient to keep
your hand on the mouse and do that. It is something that you can survey
pretty easily to get an actual answer. But in any case, detecting if a
person has a hardware volume knob is impossible, and there are plenty of
people without them, so I don't think we should optimise for the case
that a person does have one.

Why GNOME should provide a direct volume interface rather than making implications about how a user controls volume
I.E. because of the following things we can't determine about the dynamics of volume:
-how loud or quiet the speakers are at maximum volume output (is it possible to wake up everyone in the apartment building? Is it nearly impossible to hear from your speakers because of white noise?)
-what volume level is appropriate for the environment (are you a student in lecture?)
-how sensitive the speaker system is  to volume input (can you blow them out?)
-how sensitive the user's hearing is (could the user be hard of hearing? do they not respond well to higher volume levels such as many of our users with autism?)
-whether there's a hardware volume knob
-whether the is using speakers or headphones (even visually you can often no longer tell)

>
> > ... the window list applet ... can
> > control an application's volume by using the wheel on top of a window
> > name in the list.
> ...
>
> Again - why do you need to change the volume for individual windows or apps?

I would have thought that it is typically what a person wants when they
adjust the volume. When I turn down the volume of my music player, it is
probably because the song is too loud, not because the combined sound of
the song, plus the notification noises from my instant messenger are too
loud. The times when you want a master volume control exist too, but I
would have thought they were a bit less common, even if most of the time
they have close to the same result.

Out of my list of rules:
1. ****(what you mention) Temp sounds may interfere with multimedia, but not vice versa.
2. Multimedia may interfere with other multimedia.
3. Temp sounds should not interfere with other temp sounds.
4. Temp sounds and multimedia may interfere with audio input.
5. A user may currently (and intentionally) prioritize different temp
sounds produced by an application by not muting the sounds of that
application. (reworded a little bit)

So even further, what can be determined from this list:
(0) It's useful to control the volumes of different applications when using those applications.
(1, 2, 5) It's useful to be able to control volumes of all types of sounds when using a multimedia application.
(1) It's not as useful to be able to control volumes of all types of sounds when using an application that only uses temporary sounds.
(3) It's useful to be able to discern different temporary sounds
(4) It's useful to be able to toggle full audio output in an audio recording application
(rules one, two, and five)

So what can be answered in this discussion:
1. How do we make it easy to control an application's volume?
2. How do we make it easy to control volume among all audio-streaming applications when using a multimedia application?
3. How do we ensure temporarily sounds are easily discernable?
4. How do we make it easy to toggle audio output when using a sound recording application?

Three and four are gimmes. One and two are being overthought imo.