Kenny Bunch

The boys and girls at SuperDeluxe celebrated their 6 month birthday yesterday by revamping their site. My presents to them were their shiny new playlist video player and the super dooper featured videos end slate. I can’t honestly say they were presents though, since the inhouse team basically wrapped them. To that point, I’m pretty happy with the overall simplicity of the design the design team was able to come up with. We started out with a lot extra information on both the featured videos slate and the playlist player, then basically stripped it all away.

Criticisms
Though I do like the simplicity of the design, there are a few things I’m unsure of. For one, the interaction metaphor present in the playlist player is the static browse/view stance. As I pointed out with Adult Swim, these are separate tasks. I can’t decide if the nature of how the module is used justifies this coupled view or whether it should be more like Adult Swim’s. I will say that unlike Adult Swim, browsing is rather limited and there is a focus on the “playlist”. The decision could go either way, so what do you think? I also don’t know how I feel about the featured videos end slate showing up in the context of the playlist player itself. You typically won’t see this slate because continuous play is enabled. However, when it does appear in this context it is an odd experience. In my eyes, the videos in the side list are the related videos. Why would there be two lists at the same time representing the same thing? It makes sense to just have a video’s details or a replay slate instead. Anyways, those are my basic criticisms.

Potential Interaction Models
Now if we were to decouple the browse and view tasks, I can think of a couple of ways to do this. One example is the new YouTube viral player. Their player blends featured videos and the playlist into a single entity, essentially making it a playlist player. The main oddity in this situation for us is that the “playlist” is not noticeable up front. It only appears when paused, completed, or when the menu is clicked. Thus, video choice is pushed upon you from the start. The decision in this case is not to show choice, but assumes you know choice and want to offer alternatives as a side. Hence it leans more towards featured than pure playlist choice. Regardless, I do like where they went with the player, even if it does use the to cool for school OSX style navigation on the thumbs. All that said, are there any other existing players that follow this model that might be a better fit? I’m interested to hear what you all think or view examples, since I’m always searching for the best model myself.Thanks, and let me know your thoughts!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 8:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.