When Bad Usability become Good Usability

Way back in the day when tabbed browsing was still a novelty and the market share of ground breaking browsers such as Firefox and Opera were still mostly made up of people who were either cutting edge new adopters or self proclaimed geeks the usage of a tabbed interface was not recognized by everyone as being an usability improvement. Some preferred to stick to their trusty old IE6 claiming that they were used to the way things work in IE6. Slowly, many people switched away though, getting used to the idea of tabbed browsing, in fact, tabs are used in many forms and fashions throughout the web and beyond. My point? Bad usability such as the tabless interface in IE6 can be percieved as being better than it’s superior competitors, purely because you are used to it.

Another such example that did not go in the direction I hoped it would is the play/pause button found on the iTunes interface. I suspect it is a remnant from the realworld tape/cd players interfaces we were used to. Difference is though that a play/pause button on a tapedeck is either pressed in or not, giving clear visual cues as to what the state of things are. On the iTunes interface I always find myself guessing. The button shows a pause icon, is that what it does? No, that is its state. All the other buttons seem to work differently though, what you see is what you get, not what you see is what it is. I suppose it could be easily argued that something cannot be both paused and playing so toggling the functionality is supposed to be logical. But, as I mentioned, it is confusing because all other buttons perform the function that is attributed to them via an icon.

iTunes:

WMP11:

WMP2:

Foobar2000

Sadly, this interaction seems to have flowed over in most music/video player, including web based flash players and if I am not mistaken, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player adopted it too in later versions of it’s interface. However, I have become used to this and as a result, I actually expect it. My player of choice (arguably worst usability found in any music player) is Foobar2000 and it does not behave that way. Play button plays music, pause pauses it. No surprises. Except that when I press play, I expect it to pause, which, when you say it like that seems like terribly usability.