I’m a pretty avid itunes user, but lately I have been noticing there are fundamental design issues that cripple the itunes interface. As I have been adding more and more movies to my itunes library, It has become quite clear that this portion of the application needs a facelift.

The Movie Preview Page

I must admit, this page baffles me.. on any number of levels. The thumbnail view is completely lacking in design and usability. Not only is its jet black background fundamentally out of place in the Itunes white/grey design scheme… but with your typical widescreen movie, you are limited to a preview image approximately 100 pixels long — hardly enough information to make out a face, much less serve any preview purpose.

To make matters worse, itunes insists on providing you unnecessary metadata for what is essentially a visual preview mode… without providing room to display most of the data it insists upon. If you look a the example screen-capture, you will see that most titles more then 20 characters long get cut off. This is especially true with the Stanford university video where nearly every piece of information in each content area.

What bothers me about these problems is that there is more then ample space in this view to display twice the information, with a much larger preview, but instead we get huge gaps of black background. Let’s do some quick math… with an average size window (800w x 600h)… you have an area of 480,000 square pixels. If each preview image is 100w x 50h (average approximation for DVD movies), and you only put 15 previews in this area (3 across, 5 down) , you end up using only 15% of the total useable space for preview purposes! (75000 [100*50*15] / 480,000). And this is IN PREVIEW MODE!

I would love to see a movie preview page that did movie previews well. In fact, I would prefer navigating my video library visually instead of textually but alas, Apple’s implementation just isn’t worth using. Apple, you can do better.

I have my issues with coverflow as well; but perhaps that is better saved for another post.