[Warm up exercise] Bad Design

A product that receives bad quality of experience from users can not be a good design!

iTunes Store

Why did I choose iTunes as the bad design?
Firstly, I'd like to give you some ideas about iTunes, and its basic features. iTunes is known as a digital media player which is very much like Windows Media Player ( WMP). It was first introduced by Apple Inc. in January , 2001 for playing and organizing digital music and video files. Because iTunes is introduced by Apple, it is widely known as a service going along with Apple products, such as Apple iPod. It's very hard to compare iTunes and WMP because it depends on the customers' demands. However, overall iTunes offers end-users with a bunch of features. To name a few, they are:
1. iTunes Store: allow users to download purchased digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games and feature lengh films.
2. Playlists : " Smart playlists" are playlists that can be set to automatically updated based on customer' options.
3. Music library: a virtual library allowing users to import and export songs, acess and edit a song's attributes.
4. File format support: read, write, and convert between MP3, WMA, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC.
5. Printing: print song lists, and album lists.
6. Plugins: ( very much like WMP) allows users to create music-driven visual displays

7. Podcasting
8. Synchronizing iPod: iTunes can automatically synchronize its music and video library with an iPod everytime it is connected. New songs and playlists are automatically copied to the iPod and songs that have been deleted from the library on the computer are also deleted from the iPod. Automatic synchronization can be turned off in favor of manually copying individual songs according to users' preferences. iTunes supports only copying music to the iPod but not from it.

etc...

However, sometimes "the best ideas are the simplest ideas". A lot of features accidentally turned iTunes into the bad design and stole the user-friendliness of the product.

User Reaction
I chose two people for the reflection of the product. One never used iTunes before, and the other one has used iTunes for 5 months ( she bought her first iPod in September, 2006). The reason I chose two kinds of users was to test the user-friendliness and the design of iTunes.

1. New user: She looked impatient when she tried to open iTunes. She kept double- clicking on iTunes icon until the interface of iTunes appeared on the computer screen. She felt annoyed when clicking on some buttons under LIBRARY ( Music, Movies, etc) because it took time to load those programs. For her, WMP and iTunes are merely tools of playing and organizing music, therefore why we don't use WMP instead of iTunes. She kept asking me about all the features of iTunes. Then, she wanted to show me one of her favorite song. Her song happened to be in wma file. When she right-clicked to choose playing that song with iTunes, that song couldn't play. She tried with another song in mp3, that song played. She said all her songs in spite of their formats ( wma or mp3) can be played with WMP. Generally, for her, iTunes is very slow to open, not user-friendly to new users compared to WMP.
2. Current user : Here are her feedbacks after using iTunes in 5 months
   

• Bad #1:Not user-friendly :She admited that she spent the whole evening learning how to use iTunes, and how to export music from iTunes to iPod.
  
• Bad #2 : Causing computer hang : iTunes software is quite big. Therefore, whenever she opens it, her computer ( IBM T43, RAM: 2 dimm, each with 512 MB) is slowed down. Sometimes, her computer is hung for a while if she opens many programs at the same time.
• Bad # 3 : iTunes can read some file formats only ( as mentioned earlier). Therefore, it takes time for iTunes to convert songs from wma format into AAC format. Her music folder is around 10 GB with many songs in wma format. Therefore, she couldn't stand iTunes when it converted all those songs into AAC format. Frankly speaking, she said time for iTunes to convert individual song is quite fast. But to convert a big amount of songs in wma format, it really slows down her computer. She admitted that she gave up so many times by stopping the converting process. As a result, another problem came out. Next time when she chose to export some musics into iTunes, the same process of converting happened, which created duplicated songs ( Songs are converted twice. You can see some songs are duplicated in the picture below). For her, it is a flaw of iTunes in a sense that it can't recognize those songs that have already been converted.
• Bad #4 : It is very time-consuming to arrange music folder manually. Her iPod has a capacity of 2GB, whereas her music in total is 10GB. Therefore, she had to choose songs which she wanted to sync to iPod manually. Otherwise, iTunes will inform that the music in the library exceeds the capacity of iPod. As a result, no single music is copied into iPod.
  
• Bad #5 : Synchronizing iPod causes troubles sometimes. She told me about her bad experience with iTunes. Her iPod used to run out of battery when she didn't bring her laptop along. Therefore, she had to use her friend's computer to charge ( by downloading iTunes into her friend's computer). Because she didn't notice of the automatic update function of iTunes , all her music in iPod went out by updating the empty music folder ( which is on his friend's computer).
  

All in all, she complained about flaws and complicatedness of iTunes.

After interacting with iTunes, both new user and current user agreed that iTunes is not user-friendly enough. As a result, for the current user, she only uses iTunes when charging her iPod , and most of the time she still uses WMP for playing music. Lesson learnt here is that user-friendliness is one of the determinant factors for users to adopt a particular product. In terms of brand name, both are aware of the service offered by Apple.

My reflection:

I used to undergo what the new user experienced. And I have the same thoughts of the current user after using iTunes for nearly a year. Moreover, I have a very bad experience with iTunes. That time my computer was affected with viruses or something that I was not really sure. As a result, it made my computer very slow. However, I still tried to charge my iPod when my computer was very slow. What happened was that iTunes seemed unable to open, iTunes couldn't recognize iPod. However, the charging was still completed. But when I touched on the iPod , it got shock , which was very scared. I would say fairly that the iPod got shock was not due to iTunes. However, based on the 2 reactions I got from friends ( new user and current user) and based on my bad experience with iTunes, I would say iTunes is not really as a good design as people often boast . Instead, it is really a BAD DESIGN to some extent.