Much of this work is driven by English-language business. So much so that organizations we’ve worked with in South America, the Middle East, and South Asia have asked us to focus on English-language training for their staff and students.

The intention behind this English-first approach is to grow capacity and capability in doing business globally, but the result can make onboarding, upskilling, and collaboration more difficult.

Through our ongoing research and practice at Say Yeah, we asked: how might we improve how language is incorporated in learning programs to better enable a global and diverse workforce?

Let’s take a look at how this works.

Getting started with an English-language course is common across the globe. In the examples that follow, we’ll reference our Practical Inclusive Design course.

One of the key considerations (and gaps we see across courses) is that, while new terms are consistently introduced to learners throughout a course, there’s no easy way to gather or reference those terms.

A Glossary should be standard across all courses.

A Glossary is a central reference for learners to jog their memory related to key topical terms. And it allows for so much more.

In addition to gathering key terms related to a course topic, we can move beyond the written word to incorporate audio. This helps learners not just see and spell a word, but also incorporate it into their vocabulary with confidence, whether reading, writing, or speaking.

Better still, we can expand the capabilities of a glossary to include the most common languages spoken in a region, workplace, or with global partners. In our course example, we’ve included English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

You can easily add more languages that may be relevant to your workforce or group of learners.

Now you can prepare for a discussion with a colleague who speaks another language by reading and listening to those keywords relevant to your conversation in their native language.

And there’s more.

The foundation of the glossary allows for new integrated multi-lingual references across an entire course. Consider when you’re working through a new course, coming across new terms.

On any page of a course, the terms you may not be familiar with are highlighted. By clicking on the term, not only do you see the definition in the language of the course, but you can hear how this word sounds.

If you’re new to English, you can see the word in your native language to help you make the connection to this new English term.

Or, if you’re collaborating with a colleague who prefers a language other than English, you can review the word in their language and join them in conversation.

This kind of integrated multi-lingual learning is a natural evolution for eLearning that we can help you provide, whether integrating these capabilities within your existing eLearning authoring tools or helping you get started.

Get in touch today to talk about how we can help your entire organization learn and work smarter.

Let’s talk

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This new technology:

• opens up course accessibility
• automates personalization for learners
• remains portable and compatible with existing LMS and HRIS systems.

And it’s only available from Say Yeah!

Let’s explore why this is so important and how it works.

There’s a fundamental challenge with learning where most courses—whether online, hybrid, in a classroom, or led by a workplace trainer—follow a single, typically lecture-based model.

One course, delivered one way, for everyone.

The challenge is, people learn in different ways. And this single model or format for delivering a course doesn’t help everyone learn and grow with confidence.

That’s a problem for workplace preparedness and development, where success is measured by growing the capacity and capability of everyone on a team.

To address this, we’ve developed a software framework that helps you deliver next-generation learning programs to everyone, whether you’re launching a brand new course, or working with an existing LMS or HRIS system.

I’d like to share with you a transformative shift in eLearning that celebrates and supports every learner, giving them the options they need to engage more effectively with course content in order to move from knowledge to action in their day-to-day work. ~ Say Yeah CEO, Lee Dale

When we develop a course together, we combine course content best practices with the latest AI-powered eLearning automations to quickly and easily expand single-track learning to allow people to watch, listen, or read a course.

Included is the ability for every learning to adjust the settings to their ideal:

• Auto advance to the next lesson to keep the course material flowing.
• Scroll with spoken text and have the video move along with you. The video anchors in the corner and the screen scrolls to the text that’s being spoken.
• Highlight spoken text so you can follow along with the narration even more closely.

The settings are designed to support multiple learning modes so every learner can work through the course in a way that works best for them, with the flexibility to adjust at any time.

A sample course interface showing how text highlights as video and audio play and all the available settings adjustments you may choose from.

Impressively, our software accelerates the previously manual process of creating multiple formats for content by leveraging subject matter expertise, instructional design expertise, custom code, and artificial intelligence to quickly and automatically deliver multiple formats that support every learner.

So what used to be difficult to make and manage becomes almost automatic to create, and effortless to update.

Get in touch today to transform your learning programs with automated personalization and discover the impact of adaptive eLearning.

Let’s talk

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No judgement. Most websites are, so you’re not alone.

That’s because, when people are making a website, they typically focus on a combination of creating engaging content and a great look and feel. Even if you also focus on code alongside these areas, you’re likely missing out on issues that make your site more challenging to use for many people.

This standard way of working isn’t conducive to considering all the ways people interact with websites. It’s assumed that everyone uses a mouse or touch, when many other people use a screen reader or keyboard. We simply weren’t taught with this in mind, and most organizations—whether you’re building a website in-house or working at an agency—simply don’t fill in the gaps in this learning.

In general, there are three typical ways people interact with your website:
1. mouse/touch;
2. voice (such as listening to the content of a website using VoiceOver); and,
3. keyboard.

If you’re like most digital professionals, you primarily think through interactions with mouse and touch. However, without considering these other interaction models, your site will be broken for those people who rely on assistive technology or a keyboard-only way of navigating the web.

Why do these issues matter?

There are several impacts on your users if your site doesn’t consider accessibility, especially these alternative modes of navigation.

Limiting access

If your site is only optimized for touch and mouse/trackpad interaction, you’re limiting the potential users of your website before people even get the chance to decide if your content or product will meet their needs.

Frustrating users

Often these issues make the experience more difficult or frustrating to use, even if users can get around them. If users get stuck inside a modal or have to listen to repeated content over and over again, they will quickly give up on trying to use your site, regardless of how great your content might be.

Violating accessibility compliance legislation

In addition to issues for users accessing your site, not implementing these changes can also pose a problem if you or your organization are required to meet accessibility standards.

Your site needs to accommodate and be fully functional for screen readers, keyboard-only users, and other accessibility needs to meet standards like AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act).

Complying with this legislation is especially crucial for larger organizations and public sector organizations.

What can you do to fix these issues?

There are two key areas to tackle to fix these accessibility and usability issues:

1. Test your site yourself/with your team

2. Test your site with a diverse group of users that reflects your market

User testing photo shot by UX Indonesia

1. Test your site yourself/with your team

To find and improve these issues, you must go through your website using accessibility tools like VoiceOver to see how a screen reader reads the site, and to see where this functionality might be broken or difficult to use.

This testing process should also include using your site with the keyboard ‘tab’ key and seeing if you can jump from element to element without using your mouse/trackpad.

Pro tip: it’s much easier to understand how your website is broken by using VoiceOver and your keyboard yourself, rather than looking through your code to try to find issues.

By actually using these modes of navigation on your site, you’ll be able to identify several issues before ever even putting your website in front of users.

2. Test your site with a diverse group of users that reflects your market

In addition to testing your website amongst you and your team, making a genuinely user-centred and accessible site necessitates testing with real users.

Especially important is testing with users who require accessibility accommodations and who use these tools on a day to day basis, as well as testing with a diverse population that represents your market.

Some great organizations that focus on accessible and inclusive user testing are Fable Tech Lab’s accessibility user testing and GRIT Toronto’s inclusive user testing. These organizations can help you work with a wide variety of users who interact with websites in different ways and who come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

To get the research insights you need and to design websites that are delightful for all of your potential users, being aware of and testing for these accessibility and usability issues with real assistive technology and live users, is critical to understanding how to make your website as usable and enjoyable as it can be.

Here’s the thing: it’s not hard to do better.

And if you bake it into your process from the beginning, it’s much easier.

Here’s a three step guide to becoming an expert:

1. Start with knowing there’s something wrong by testing the website yourself.

This will make it clear what’s happening and why it sucks, instead of relying on a tool that might not get it or a person who has to explain it to you.

2. Learn more about what’s causing the issue and what you can do to improve it.

To learn more about key tools and requirements like keyboard navigation, landmarks, alt tags, headings, screen readers, and more, check out our web accessibility glossary.

3. Figure out how to fix those issues.

A good reference for that would be the official WCAG accessibility guidelines or you can ask for our help!

Looking for a quick way to get started fixing your website?

Getting all of this right from the start is tough. Knowing there’s something wrong doesn’t necessarily help you in understanding what the specific issue is and what you can do about it. That’s why we launched the Inclusive Website Audit service.

With the audit service, we’ll help you take next steps by identifying the key issues on your website that are impacting usability, accessibility, and inclusivity, including speech and keyboard navigation, and much more.

Learn more about the Inclusive Website Audit service

The post Your website is broken: a look at the accessibility issues you probably forgot to test for appeared first on Say Yeah!.

However, accessibility checkers have a significant gap: they are focused on code and strict technical compliance, not on usability, design, and content, and can’t truly identify how real people understand and interact with your website.

Accessibility checkers aren’t able to mimic how real people will interact with your website and content.

Here are some areas where automated tools will let you down.

They’re incomplete

Even for some technical items, these tools are not sufficient to be compliant. That’s because many of the standards set by the WCAG can only be evaluated manually, or are up to the discretion of an expert. Things like whether focus states function, or whether carousels are accessible, are difficult or impossible to evaluate with an automated tool due to their complexity.

Although you can meet many accessibility objectives with automated tools, a full manual review will take you much further. Through a manual review, you can build a site that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience than just those whose needs are covered by compliance standards.

They can be inaccurate

Some of the tests run by automated accessibility testing tools can be inaccurate, or give you false positives, which may make you think your site is more accessible than it is. With our site, we scored 100 (perfect score) on Google Lighthouse well before our website was genuinely accessible, especially with regard to screen readers.

Automated tools may flag issues taken care of in an alternate way—for example, for our forms, input elements like text boxes don’t have a focus state, because, in Javascript, we focus on the element surrounding the input. This implementation causes the checker to fail on that element, but the accessibility requirement is still being met based on WCAG criteria.

They can’t make choices

Many accessibility items are—even in WCAG’s official documentation—up to the discretion of the designer or developer. For instance, there might be many different ways to do the same thing, such as navigating a menu with a keyboard.

On our site, we’ve made it so that the menu uses the tab key to move to each of the top-level items, and arrow keys to access the sub-menus. Still, WCAG also provides examples where the tab key only accesses the first menu item, and arrow keys to move left/right between the other elements.

Both of these ways are technically accessible, but one or the other might make your site or specific design more or less usable.

Automated accessibility checkers aren’t able to help you make a judgement call.

Another example of this is adding labels to items to supplement what screen readers say out loud. For instance, adding a page header label to banner landmarks in order to be more descriptive and clear.

Automated accessibility checkers aren’t able to help you make this judgement call. You’ll need real users to test to see which one is more intuitive to use. Or an expert to take a look and evaluate your design.

They can’t see

Another area where accessibility checkers often fall short is in understanding the images and graphics on your site. If you use automated checkers often, you might notice that no matter what you do, warnings about text in images or clear alt tags never disappear.

This gap is because automated checkers can’t see your images and designs to determine whether you’ve met these requirements or not. In essence, they can’t know the context and content to make this judgement call.

So, instead, a manual review of images is necessary to make sure that text is not in any of your images, and alt tags explain the content of an image in a way that provides proper context.

Additionally, an accessibility checker can’t tell you how screen readers are reading out your content in real life beyond a simple “is it reading something” check.

For instance, if SVG settings aren’t set up for screen readers by setting the inline SVGs to have a role=“img” tag, the screen reader will try to announce the tags inside it, which results in announcing repetitive “IMAGE” tags over and over. This example is a terrible experience for people who use screen readers, and it’s unlikely an automated checker would let you know that this is occurring.

They can’t read

As far as the written content on your site, this is where automated accessibility checkers are the most limited.

Automated accessibility tools do not consider an inclusive lens, which can leave your site open to alienating potential users or inadvertently making content that excludes people. No automated tool can determine how your site makes users feel, or if they are feeling excluded by your content or the feel of your website.

The words and images you use on your website impact how a user feels, and an accessibility checker can’t analyze those words and images.

The combination of the words and imagery you use have context associated with them that makes users feel a certain way, from a spectrum of delighted to offended. A purely-automated accessibility tool can never understand this.

A more suitable process

So, if automated accessibility testing tools won’t get your site to where it needs to be, what should you do?

The best process is a comprehensive design, code, and content process, where you and your team work to ensure your site is as usable, accessible, and inclusive as possible. Then plan to review, improve, and test these items continually (internally or, preferably, with users). Using this process will help you holistically improve not just your site’s accessibility, but the general usability and performance of your website.

Most importantly, moving beyond automatically checking code—and embracing design, interaction, and usability considerations, alongside inclusive content—will open up your site to more potential users and help convert more of the users who are currently visiting.

Go beyond automated accessibility checkers with the Inclusive Website Audit

Make your website more usable, accessible, and inclusive for all with the Inclusive Website Audit. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

The post Why automated accessibility checkers can’t make your website accessible appeared first on Say Yeah!.

History shows that organizations who invest in their future when the economy is struggling set themselves up to become market leaders during the ensuing economic growth period.

That’s why we’re thrilled today to be launching a new way to evaluate and improve your site’s usability, accessibility, and inclusion: The Inclusive Website Audit.

This audit guides your team to optimize your website for all audiences and to improve your use of accessibility standards like WCAG 2.1, all reviewed by our expert team.

Learn more about the Inclusive Website Audit

Why is this process so important?

These three factors (usability, accessibility, & inclusion) are key to reaching a wider audience, and retaining and embracing the diverse audience you already have. By improving these factors, your site can be used and loved by even more people, and you can avoid alienating or excluding potential customers.

No two users have the exact same needs and context for which they use your site. As a result, these three factors must be at the forefront of the design, development, and content of your website to be able to capture the widest breadth of your addressable market.

How the audit works

You can choose between an Essential, Starter, and Custom audit package, each providing actionable next steps you can take to improve your website.

No matter which one you choose, we’ll look at a range of factors for usability, accessibility, and inclusion, from mobile responsiveness, to screen-reader tagging, to the language used in your site’s content and the images you share throughout your site.

This range of criteria ensures that you’ll get a comprehensive overview of how your site is doing in these areas, and a more detailed breakdown of the issues on your site.

Learn more about our comprehensive audit process.

Your path to a more inclusive website begins here

Get started today with improving your website to be usable, accessible, and inclusive for all of your potential customers. Don’t miss out on expanding your reach and engagement!

Get started from $999

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Say Yeah, 100% template-free design.

These same-looking websites which take over your scrolling, essentially breaking 15 years of web standards, limiting differentiation, and starting with a splash screen are a pox on the internet.

Hopefully they have a very short shelf life. By then, of course, mobile app templates will be de rigueur and we’ll have another bottle against mediocrity to fight.

(Apologies for this rant from Lee, but no value comes of these over-designed, standards breaking shortcuts.)

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We’ve also been keeping an eye on Tim Bray’s efforts to make logging in safer and simpler. He’s advocating two-step authentication now and a future where you don’t need a user name and password to login. That would be great, but we’re not there yet.

And today I was led to Mailchimp’s article outlining some key findings based on a few login page redesigns.

So let’s look at some of the most important login screen considerations.

From Mailchimp:

The engineering team, ever mindful of security, argued that being generic about username and password errors makes it harder for bad guys to guess usernames by pounding the form with random words or email addresses.

Most login forms give you a generic error along the lines of “Your username and password is incorrect.” Engineering has long held that this is to protect the site from hackers, but it means your user doesn’t know if they have the wrong password or the wrong user name. The result: more users having to go through a tedious password recovery process.

We’ve had this security argument with engineering teams in the past. Mailchimp won the battle for their users—and we encourage you to fight for yours—because letting users know exactly what’s wrong with their login credentials far outweighs any security considerations.

On the subject of social login buttons, Mailchimp has this to say about adding Facebook, Twitter, and other login buttons to login forms:

As you add login buttons to a page, you also add decision points for users, while creating visual complexity in your design.

And:

If you’re using Twitter and Facebook for signup too you’ve got a bigger problem. A user’s credentials are then bound to another account on another service that could be canceled at any time, breaking access to your app without the user knowing. Unless you require a username and password for your app, then pair that with credentials from a social network, you’re creating opportunity for confusion and frustration for your users.

Mailchimp says only 3.4% of their users would login via the Facebook or Twitter logins. Though I’d love to see some stats from both equally busy and smaller sites regarding social login button usage in 2013 (Mailchimp’s article dates back to last autumn), there’s no doubt there’s wisdom in a number of the considerations Mailchimp points out.

That said, avoiding social logins altogether isn’t necessarily the only or best option, with some sites now choosing to hide their own user name and password fields to reduce complexity and focus more on the social login.

Yet, if you read Mailchimp’s article in full, they continue to argue against any use of social logins, noting additional concerns around brand dilution, managing user accounts, and consumer confusion.

In fact, Mailchimp goes on to state that they didn’t want to trust the safety of their customer logins to a provider like Facebook or Twitter. They’d prefer to be responsible for that security themselves. And maybe they have the engineering chops to handle that, but I’d bet Twitter and Facebook have a much better handle on security than most web apps and other sites that require login credentials.

Even still, let’s consider the process social logins afford vs traditional user/password combinations. With a social login, you can leverage your existing login to your daily obsession (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc) and you simply authenticate (and can revoke at any time) the site you’re browsing. If you stay logged in to Facebook, for example, you never have to type a password into your browser, provided the sites you visit support Facebook logins.

Here’s Tim Bray with more details:

One of the key advantages Federated Identity (represented by social login buttons) is cutting down the number of times people have to type in passwords. There are a bunch of good reasons for this:

• Every time it happens, that’s another chance for password theft.
• We don’t want to get people into the habit of typing…passwords in here and there; that habit is a great big red target sign saying “Phish me!”
• Typing passwords all the time is a painful user experience, particularly on mobile devices.
• The easiest way to reduce that pain is to use a short, simple, password, probably the same one you’re using everywhere including on your easily-hacked kid’s-Little-League site.

Security isn’t just who holds the passwords, it’s also how your users interact with them. Social logins can help improve security overall by making user’s lives easier and less reliant on (often simplified for convenience) passwords.

In the end, your login page should be reflective of your user base and their goals, which means considering all of these factors.

If you’re not happy with how your sign up and login forms are performing, we can help you measure, refine, and improve this process for your users so they can focus on using your app.

Get In Touch

The post Towards better logins. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Let’s take a look at some key features of using your music library to see where Apple’s gone off the rails with this update.

Things people do on the regular, like importing CDs (although this must be a passé ritual since new Macs no longer shop with optical drives); managing your iTunes library and file storage; viewing and finding your music. By no means a definitive list, but an embarrassingly long one, nonetheless.

Importing

Here are four wonderful iTunes 11 design decisions which slow down the importing process:

1. Previously when importing, you could just pop the CD in and set it to auto-import. No more. You have to click the Import button. Every time.

2. This would perhaps not be so bad if you could just hit the Import button, but not even this is a one-step process. With iTunes 11, a dialog comes up to confirm the import settings. Who changes import settings with every import? This is a completely unnecessary extra window and click in the now doubly tedious import process.

3. If you are comparing an existing import to a CD (for example, I’m currently trying to upgrade a bunch of 2003 iTunes 128k imports to 320k imports) you used to be able to go the album, take a look at the bit rate, compare track names, edit the CD track names, import, and jump back to your library to double-check all the songs were replaced and no duplicates imported.

Now, the default view for iTunes is album view which doesn’t show you the bit rate or genre, so you have to switch to another view (Songs, Playlists, etc) to confirm bit rate and genre (along with track name, artist, year, and album name), then change to the CD view, update the details there to match, and import.

This is a multi-step process because there is no way to see both the CD view and existing album view at the same time. And to make this an even more tedious process, when you switch back to the music library from the CD view, you are greeted with a default Album view. In other words, not only are you not in the view you were last in, but even in Album view, the album you were last looking at is not selected, so you have to search for the album you’re importing once again. So, so tedious.

4. Making this even more of a nightmare to manage, it appears that with iTunes 11, even when files are reconciled in iTunes and the 128k file now shows as 320k in your music library, both the 128k and 320k file are saved to your hard drive. So now you have a duplicate of every file on your computer, though you’d never know if you didn’t look at your hard drive.

In every previous version of iTunes, reimporting would delete the older file, keeping only the new one.

Now, you could argue this isn’t that big of a deal. Why not just delete the crappy 128k version and import the new CD all over as 320k. The trouble here is, this gets rid of play counts, ratings, and removes the songs from any playlists they were ever manually added to. For someone who has smart playlists set up and is fanatical about putting songs into playlists to keep them organized, this is even more of a nightmare than dealing with duplicate 128k files on a hard drive.

In any case, you’re left with the following import options with iTunes 11:

1. Destroy all your smart playlists by deleting lower bit rate imports and reimporting your CDs at your desired higher bit rate.
2. Import your CDs overwriting previous imports and use Finder to delete all the duplicate lower bitrate files manually.
3. Suck it up and keep listening to poor quality files from 2003.

Managing Files

This past week’s update to iTunes 11.0.1 brings the duplicate files view back. Alas, this ‘feature’ continues to be useless. More on that and a couple of other tedious file management issues.

1. iTunes still makes no effort to discern the difference between the same song on a different album vs the same song on the same album with the same or slightly different criteria. (ie, a true duplicate and/or a file with a different duration or bit rate that’s off the same album, and so on. For that, you’ll need to ask Doug for some help.

2. Missing files are still referenced only within the play order column, so there’s no way to sort your library by missing files and deal with them directly. And I swear around iTunes 10.4 or so you could select one missing file and match it and iTunes would attempt to match all the other missing files based on the same file structure. But, that certainly has not been the case for many years, so you’re left dealing with missing files one at a time. If you can even find them.

3. Renaming an artist, genre, album, or otherwise, causes any search or list to be reset to  once that item disappears from the list. I suspect this is an issue with everything being stored in a single XML file, but that just points to the fact that iTunes 11 uses the same sorry guts of every previous iTunes. ie, it’s 10 years old and is sorely in need of being rewritten to improve performance, if nothing else.

In fact, renaming a song in a list jumps that song to the top of your list (even if you’re sorted by album. This new and unnecessary behaviour is confusing. Your list shouldn’t be jumping around at all. Ever.

Views

Then there are new limited view options which make navigating your library more cumbersome than ever.

1. Multiple windows, for one, are gone. If I could open the CD I’m importing in a separate window, I could avoid the reset of the Music library view (described above) when I’m comparing an import to a CD.

2. And while making playlists by dragging to the right has it’s benefits when you’re just noodling around, there are three major issues with this interaction:

i. it only works in certain views. If you’re in Playlist view or have the Sidebar open, for example, dragging left inexplicable does nothing.

ii. if you’re trying to create a Playlist from multiple locations in your library (ie, doing a lot of jumping around or searching to build a playlist for, say, a house party, or wedding, or to romance someone, it’s far, far easier to open this in a separate window and drag and drop, which leads to the final point about creating manual Playlists;

iii. with a separate Playlist window, you’re able to drag and drop in the order you want. ie, you can put a song between track 3 and 4. With the sidebar option, you’re just dumping a bunch of songs in a list and you have to go that Playlist later to order them. Again, this is unnecessarily tedious.

To be fair, iTunes does offer a new Edit Playlist view which anchors the playlist on the right hand side of iTunes and switches the main view to song view so you can move any song into the Playlist. But this hides all other Playlists, so if you want to drag from any one playlist to another, your only option is to turn on the sidebar and move one song at a time because, of course, if you show the sidebar, Edit Playlist no longer works, and vice versa.

Just another mindless inconsistency that makes getting used to these new, limiting features, a nightmare.

3. Back to general views, we now have a dropdown view selector with List, Artist, and Album view.

And within Artists view you get this hybrid list view with album art, but no standard album view.

Meanwhile, with all the effort to make the library more artwork friendly, there’s an odd-ommission: the removal of a Cover Flow view means any single artist track playlists (best ofs, compilations I’ve made, etc) now has no artwork. Previously, I’d flip on Cover Flow so as we moved from track to track the artwork for that song would show. Now there’s only plain old list view, or Artist view, which shows massive gaps between each individual song.

And we have the command B viewer

And, as a quick aside, what’s with the scrollbars in iTunes 11?

4. And now we have 4 different play/pause buttons and 4 different shuffle buttons (which seem to offer completely different and sometimes annoyingly unclear shuffle options. Here’s the rundown:

i. The Shuffle toggle in the header allows to turn on or off shuffling of the currently playing song, retaining whatever your last shuffle settings were.

ii. The Shuffle toggle in a Playlist shuffles the entire playlist, restarting the playlist with a random track, even if you were listening to a track in the playlist.

iii. The Shuffle toggle in a Playlist that sits beside an artist name shuffles all tracks by an Artist across your entire library, not just in the Playlist you were listening to.

iv. The Shuffle toggle beside an Album name shuffles only songs in the album. ie, if there’s one track in an album and you hit this Shuffle button, you hear one track and that’s it.

In other words, there doesn’t appear to be any way to shuffle a variety of songs from a currently playing track. Well, unless you hit the arrow when you hover over the track name and select ‘Start Genius’; that’ll shuffle the song in with others, of course. Well, if Genius has any suggestions for that song.

Finding Music

1. Speaking of that arrow that’s revealed when you hover over a track name. There’s all sorts of good stuff in there. Sometimes.

5. Default search searches across all of iTunes, not just Music. This is important if you’re using a large library as it will freeze iTunes for several minutes, if not for good. This is said to be improved with iTunes 11.0.1 but I thankfully found you can change the default search to avoid this cross-iTunes music/app/book search (who would ever need that?!)

Tagging Music

There are a few improvements, quick access to making folders, for instance.

Rating is two steps in the mini player, and oddly, they’ve removed the stars from the doc rating view and replaced this with numbers 1 through 5.

The ‘cut’ command no longer works if you try to cut the last name of multi-name artist. That has to be a bug.

Genius

In fact, this update is so clearly a disaster that there’s a disconnect between the actual shipping product and the marketing screens on Apple’s website.

Every view of songs in the iTunes library on the iTunes Player section of the Apple site shows the sidebar open even though it’s closed by default. No doubt this is because it’s just about  the only way to find Genius Playlists. The caveat being that if you select the Playlists view you can now see Genius Mixes and your latest genius mix at the top of the Playlists column. But this was clearly a last ditch effort to get Genius Mixes back into the new design as the What’s New in iTunes video does not show these at all. I can just see the meeting now where someone said, “Where can I find Genius Playlists?” And after a few futile clicks they delay the release a month.

And all of this without rearchitecting the app at all so it doesn’t rely on an extremely slow flat file database. At least if there were some performance improvements, we could enjoy those while we wait for the nightmarishly cumbersome and inconsistent design issues to  be addressed with subsequent updates.

Alas, all I’m left hoping for now is that they quickly address the inconsistencies in behaviour across different views and the file management issues before I run out of patience and attempt a downgrade to 10.7. In the meantime, I’ll try to focus my time on enjoying the Mini Player and trying to find some excuse to use the album view as those are, as far as your music is concerned, about the only discernible improvements over iTunes 10.7.

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Khoi shares some particular insight into the market, in comparing the initial iPad app, which was highly immersive, but much less viral than needed to drive success.

Users of Mixel for iPad spent a lot of time in the app, and those numbers were consistently outperforming our benchmark category in the App Store.

But over time it became apparent that the usage patterns for the iPad are very different than for iPhone, at least at this stage of the device’s evolution. By and large, people leave their iPads at home — they don’t take them to work — so it’s really difficult to get someone to engage with the network during the course of the day. You lose tons of opportunities to get him or her to interact with their graph, and that’s basically like starvation for a new social network.

And on the subject of users spending time with their device to craft something, and how this relates to building a mainstream audience:

Mixel for iPad tended to be pretty involved and, to our regret, required you to really work at it. It also became much more about creating art than we intended, and that resulted in a somewhat self-selecting user base. Mixel for iPhone, on the other hand, is so simple anyone can make a collage as you walk down the street. Anyone. The app does the hard work of making you look great.

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Shared Memories

I’m really excited about seeing apps where multiple users can stitch together shared memories. Mixel talks about combining collages with friends (“Your friends can add on to your collage!”), but it’s really just adding a comment to an existing collage in the form of a collage of your own, not making group collages.

I’d love to see Mixel go the Vyclone route, where you can see your friend’s photos taken in the same time and place as you and stitch together a view of the event from everyone’s perspective. In Vyclone’s case, they use video’s from multiple sources to automatically edit together one minute scenes.

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