Equality and Usability

I might have called this one Symmetry and Usability, but I think equality is a better, term for what I am about to describe. We all know that when desigining anything that has to do with human interaction we have to highlight the more important parts and hide the less important things that are only used occasionally and infrequently. Here are several examples of severe violations of this important principle.

Very recently, I was told about a very cute site called the "Songza". It's a very nice service that allows you to listen to the music via YouTube. As we know, there are quite a few music videos on YouTube, which are mostly of poor quality and rather annoying to play. The sound is generally good though, so the Songza only play the audio from the song, turning it into an on demand music channel, clearly one of those ideas I wish I thought of first.

The site is nice too except for one thing. When choosing a song to play from the list, it presents this strange on screen selector that allows you to either play the song, rate it, recommend or add to play list. All of those functions are indeed cool and necessary, however, I bet in most cases I would want to play the song, so having to "click - select - click" every time would be most annoying.



And indeed it is.

The play function is clearly the most important one here. You have tons of free space, why dont just put it right there and move the less important buttons somewhere else.

Another great example comes from the manufacturers of cheap mp3 players, oh, those never cease to amaze me. I got this one a few month ago, cause I needed a simple player for something, and it is absolutely and remarkably annoying to use.
If you look at the picture carefully, you will see that play and record buttons are exactly the same (small) size, side by side and almost completely equal.

Now guess how often do I want to record something with this thing?

You are right.

Never.