Hi all,
Firstly, thanks for MythTV. It is an incredible piece of software our
house is a better place with our MythTV box. Keep up the great work.
For a while now I have been noting down little quirks and oddities in
MythTV. Although MythTV is incredibly usable and works very well, fixing
these problems would make it more intuitive and easier to use. This list
is certainly not exhaustive and although I have been meaning to do an
exhaustive usability assessment, I have not had the time. As such, these
are major usability issues I have confronted.
I would love to conduct a more in-depth usability test in the future if
that would be of interest. I write quite a bit about design, usability
and MythTV on my blog at www.jonobacon.org.
I have put a code at the beginning of each issue for easily referring to
it.
--> General
* G1 - When watching a show, you should be able to hit the record button
to record the entire show if it has been watched from the beginning and
as such the live TV buffer contains the show. * G2 - If you schedule a
show to record, you can only watch the show at the same time as
recording it by first selecting Media Library->Watch and then selecting
a show. This is unintuitive - you should just be able to watch TV like
normal and be able to view the channel while the show is recording.
* G3 - Switching between channels is far to slow - this slowness makes
skipping through channels rather laborious. * G4 - The term 'Optical
Disks' in the menu is not particularly clear - I suspect most people
know its a Disk, but not optical. * G5 - In the Upcoming recordings
screen, the use of dimmed and non-dimmed entries in entirely unclear -
what do they signify? It is certainly unclear to me and my other half.
The other problem is that many of the entries listed in Upcoming will
not actually be taped because it says the recording will be taped at a
later time. If it is not going to be taped, why is it still in the list?
* G6 - Many of the screens in MythTV (such as Upcoming and Set
Priorities) have specific letters in each entry. These letters obviously
refer to something specific, but there is no legend displayed on the
screen to say what they mean. * G7 - There seems to be no simple way of
cancelling all recordings for a show other than finding it in the EPG
and changing the recording option to not record the show. The ideal
solution would be to have a list of shows that are being recorded and
then when you select a show, there are options such as Cancel this
recording, Cancel all recordings etc.
--> Electronic Programme Guide
* EPG1 - When watching TV you will often want to view the EPG. Currently
you do this by pressing Menu and then selecting Program Guide from the
on-screen menu. This two step process needs to be instead bound to a
single key so that you can press one button and access the EPG while
watching TV.
* EPG2 - When you access the EPG from the main menu, there is no TV feed
on the top right-hand corner, whereas when you access the EPG when
watching TV by pressing Menu->Program Guide, there is a TV feed in the
EPG. This behaviour needs to be unified - I would suggest always having
a feed of the current TV channel. * EPG3 - The EPG should not be inside
the Manage menu, for a few reasons. The first is that you don't really
'manage' your program schedule, and secondly because you need to
reference the EPG regularly. Why take two steps to access the EPG when
you likely want to access it on the main menu?
--> MythMusic
* MM1 - When in the main playback screen, there are a number of
different artists in a long list, but there is no way of jumping from
artist to artist.
* MM2 - If you have not created a playlist, or you have just cleared you
active play queue, MythMusic by default has no songs loaded. This is
totally unintuitive. The default functionality should be that when no no
queue or playlist is available, *all* of your music should be available
to play. It seems crazy that All My Music needs to be consciously ticked
in the Edit Playlist area to actually hear some music.
* MM3 - There is no way to create a playlist based on genre. * MM4 -
When playing back a song it lists encoding details (eg. 128kbps 44.1khz)
- this information is of no interest to most users and therefore should
not be displayed. * MM5 - There is copious room in the bottom third of
the screen, and this should really be used to display guidance notes
about creating a playlist. Creating playlists is not very intuitive and
this space could be usefully used for notes.
* MM6 - There is no obvious way to save a playlist that you have just
constructed. I still don't know how to do this. * MM7 - When creating a
playlist, the icons on the left (such as the CD icon when you have
inserted a CD and it appears below the All My Music line) are not clear
at all. This need to be much bigger or use the space at the bottom of
the screen to show a nice big icon. On my 28" TV, they just were not
clear enough and look like bullet points. * MM8 - When in the main music
playback screen and at the top of the list of songs, you can't press Up
to go to the bottom of the list. I assume the same problem happens at
the bottom of the list - you should be able to press Down to go to the
top of the list.
--> MythWeather
* MW1 - When loading MythWeather and it says it is retrieving weather
data, it takes a long time to grab this information. It would be better
if it just went away and grabbed it periodically in the background, this
giving little or no delay. * MW2 - Unlike other modules in MythTV,
MythWeather does not display information in the LCD panel on the front
of my case.
--> Ideas for features
* Reminders - there should be a feature to allow you to set a reminder
to watch a particular show, even if you are not recording it. MythTV
would then pp up a box to say the show is on and allow you to change the
channel. It would also be useful to possibly pop up a small OSD with a
countdown to when the reminded show starts. * A module to go and grab
National Lottery numbers and display them.
Cheers,
Jono
