Hey folks,
The new Media browser is pretty nifty but I find it takes too many steps to navigate for my common use-cases.
For example, to start a playlist from a Sonos device more info dialog, I click “Browse Media” to open the media browser dialog, then click “Favorites”, then click “Playlists”, then click on the playlist I want, then hope everything went well (there’s no visual confirmation that the item is going to be played), then dismiss the dialog.
Previously, I could start a playlist from the Sonos “Source” drop-down which only took one click. I agree that “Source” wasn’t the right model for favorites but the new model feels unnecessarily hierarchical. I think of my favorites as presets that I want to locate very quickly.
Likewise, I find navigating to an individual album, artist, or song to be tedious when the list is large. And the top-level folders feel quite sparse with icons loosely floating in a sea of whitespace forming a 3 column grid.
Some ideas:
- Offer two entry points to media, click one button the full hierarchical browser, click a different button to quickly play favorites from a drop-down.
- Collect all of my favorites together in a flattened list at the top level of the media browser.
- Offer a search or auto-complete function to locate specific items within lists.
- Add a UI affordance to let the user remove clutter from the UI, such as Spotify’s “Featured Playlists” item which I never use.
- Change the 3 column grid of icons to a list to increase density.
- Consider reducing the size of the album art to increase density.
- Close the dialog automatically after an item has been selected (ideally after confirming that it has started to play).