The (in)feasibility of Cover Flow
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech on here, and there’s a number of reasons for that, which I won’t get into here, but I wanted to touch a bit on Cover Flow, a relatively new user interface that Apple is heavily promoting for both the iPhone and its next OS, Leopard (branded as Quick Look).
With Cover Flow, as Apple describes it, “you can flip through your digital music and video collection the same way you flip through CDs or DVDs” and it “displays all the album art in your music collection in one easy-to-navigate interface that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.”
Designing a user interface as a metaphor to the real world is always risky business, and in this case I don’t know that it’s at all relevant. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t own a single music CD (well, that is beyond my “I’m cool and listen to music” stage of 12 years-old when I picked up Dance Mix 95 and many other rather embarrassing albums). So right away, the metaphor is lost on me. I have never, and I don’t anticipate ever flipping through CDs or DVDs. I’m also smack dab in the middle of the target demographic for both the iPhone and Mac, so what gives?
Like many people my age, I only got really heavily into music around the time Napster came out and it became a really arbitrary task to get a hold of any song that you could think of (ironic, right?). Yeah, I downloaded music using Napster, but this was before the time that anyone even figured it was illegal, and the Internet was a magical place of endless consumption. I’m now a rather regular customer of the iTunes Store, more regular than I’d like to be, anyway.
I keep my digital music library in iTunes meticulously organized. Every track has a track name, artist name, album name, and cover art properly tagged up, so I should be a perfect candidate for this kind of user interface that relies heavily on album artwork, right?
Wrong. I don’t use it! I turn it on, but it’s merely for the visual appeal. I like to see the albums flip back and forth when I change tracks, but I have never scrolled through them to find an album to play. I simply don’t associate my music with artwork. So in this regard, for me, the concept of this UI is a failure. As a visual effect, it’s fun, but because I don’t and choose not to interact with it, it might as well not be interactive at all. I think that’s why I enjoyed it while it was a standalone app, and not so much now as an integrated component in iTunes.
However, I’m curious how this applies to other people, in different age demographics, with differently-sized music collections (both physical and digital). For anyone who has a significant collection of CDs, do you regularly leaf through CDs as if they’re a part of some bounded book in the same way Cover Flow operates? If so, have you seen Cover Flow, and do you use it?
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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You’re right to say that this metaphor might be lost on people who’ve just recently started accumulating their music stash digitally, but for people who’ve been at it way back when CDs were the greatest invention since sliced bread (cool, no rewinding!), this does feel true to the experience of finding that perfect tune, albeit painful, to match your mood at the moment.
No, I don’t use it regularly to find my tunes but it’s not hard to imagine someone using it just for bringing back memories (this I’ve done quite a few times). I don’t think that this was made specifically to help you organize or search through your music (which it obviously isn’t, from your experience) but rather to simulate the nostalgic experience people had during the time when DRM doesn’t even exists in our vocabulary
BTW, I still prefer - and buy - CDs over purchasing music through iTunes. Personally, there’s just this “high” or excitement of getting something tangible out of your money compared to downloading. And I guess that goes the same for other coverflow users out there as well who might prefer reliving the experience over technological convenience.
..Or maybe I’m just getting old