that's the route of killing features because they don't fit in with some "design vision"
2013-02-19 05024, 2013
hawke_1
but like, the relationship editor vs. the old “relate to…recordings” thing.
2013-02-19 05033, 2013
ianmcorvidae
instead, we should talk about consistency and power
2013-02-19 05034, 2013
hawke_1
Huge improvement in usability though it could still use some tweaks.
2013-02-19 05041, 2013
Prophet5 joined the channel
2013-02-19 05057, 2013
ianmcorvidae
basically, "easy" rings of making apple products :P
2013-02-19 05007, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: Is that a bad thing? :-p
2013-02-19 05037, 2013
CallerNo6
if it means one-button-mice, yes
2013-02-19 05007, 2013
hawke_1
Not an apple fanboi, but damn if a lot of the stuff that they force people to think about for iOS doesn’t make it easier to use while still letting you do just as much
2013-02-19 05025, 2013
ianmcorvidae
I've literally never had the experience of it letting you do just as much
2013-02-19 05007, 2013
hawke_1
CallerNo6: yeah, one-button mice is a little excessive. :-)
2013-02-19 05012, 2013
ianmcorvidae
trying to do any moderately-complicated thing on a mac tends to require circumventing the supposedly-for-usability concessions
2013-02-19 05015, 2013
ianmcorvidae
basically, the Mac Way seems to more often result in things that are less powerful, rather than more powerful, in my experience
2013-02-19 05033, 2013
ianmcorvidae
because the focus is on making it "easy", which most developers see as opposed to something being powerful
2013-02-19 05000, 2013
ianmcorvidae
if told "don't have confirmation dialogs", most people will remove functions that require confirmation, not trust their users :)
2013-02-19 05001, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: I find it to be more “just fucking do the obviously-right things right rather than giving an option”
2013-02-19 05025, 2013
ianmcorvidae
obviously-right is very difficult to discern
2013-02-19 05036, 2013
hawke_1
yeah, it’s not easy. :-p
2013-02-19 05041, 2013
ianmcorvidae
and from my perspective nearly everyone chooses "wrong" :P
Clint: and “could be fixed” is not the same as “perfect” :-)
2013-02-19 05022, 2013
Clint
point
2013-02-19 05016, 2013
ianmcorvidae
anyway, yes, you're right that uninhibited feature creep is also bad, which I guess is why I *didn't* include "flexibility" on my list of virtues
2013-02-19 05058, 2013
Leftmost
I think ease of use with the potential for power is the ideal, but it's hard to achieve.
2013-02-19 05004, 2013
hawke_1
+1
2013-02-19 05021, 2013
ianmcorvidae
anyway my point here is that the relationship editor is not *easier* to use, for the most part -- it's just more powerful
2013-02-19 05047, 2013
ianmcorvidae
in some respects it's actually harder to use, since the mental overhead of keeping track of batch operations isn't completely trivial
2013-02-19 05047, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: I think it’s clearly easer to use too, just with the huge reduction in the number of times you have to bounce around between pages
2013-02-19 05053, 2013
ianmcorvidae
but it's certainly a lot less tedious :)
2013-02-19 05004, 2013
ianmcorvidae
ah, but that's not ease of use, that's power
2013-02-19 05044, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: No, the fact that I don’t have to click “relate to” a dozen times and wait for pages to load twice for every single one, is ease of use. :-)
2013-02-19 05013, 2013
hawke_1
even leaving aside the nice *power* things like “batch create new works”
2013-02-19 05032, 2013
ianmcorvidae
no, all the batch-relating is power features :P
2013-02-19 05036, 2013
hawke_1
it certainly did both.
2013-02-19 05044, 2013
hawke_1
but the main improvement is in ease of use.
2013-02-19 05011, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: we had the batch-relating before with “relate to…recordings”
2013-02-19 05027, 2013
ianmcorvidae
yes, but now we have batch-batch-relating
2013-02-19 05035, 2013
hawke_1
o_O
2013-02-19 05038, 2013
ianmcorvidae
as in you can batch together several related batch relations
2013-02-19 05044, 2013
ianmcorvidae
(i.e. a relationship editor session)
2013-02-19 05049, 2013
hawke_1
gotcha
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
hawke_1
yes
2013-02-19 05058, 2013
hawke_1
(for better or worse there. ;-) )
2013-02-19 05010, 2013
hawke_1
since it tends to tangle the edit comments a bit
2013-02-19 05028, 2013
ianmcorvidae
anyway, my metric here is: is your mental model of the system less complicated with the relationship editor? (I doubt it, since you still have to have the same understanding of how rels and works and what-have-you work)
2013-02-19 05040, 2013
hawke_1
definitely.
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
hawke_1
you still need to understand the system to use it effectively.
2013-02-19 05052, 2013
ianmcorvidae
the interface is easier to use because it's a more powerful tool, but that's not strictly "ease of use", I mean :)
2013-02-19 05019, 2013
ianmcorvidae
the relationship editor doesn't really reduce the mental burden of editing, which I think is fantastic and what we should be going for
2013-02-19 05035, 2013
ianmcorvidae
(other than reducing the burden by displaying things better, but that's different in my mind)
2013-02-19 05052, 2013
Cook879 joined the channel
2013-02-19 05007, 2013
ianmcorvidae
anyway, I think we agree other than on terms :P
2013-02-19 05015, 2013
ianmcorvidae
(and about apple products, but that was a tangent anyway :P)
2013-02-19 05019, 2013
hawke_1
aye. :-D
2013-02-19 05012, 2013
ianmcorvidae
anyway, I guess what I mean is that "ease of use" is very open to interpretation and is usually done wrong, so I prefer to be more specific :)
2013-02-19 05029, 2013
misterswag_ joined the channel
2013-02-19 05031, 2013
nikki
hawke_1: did you get the stats you wanted?
2013-02-19 05043, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: nah, I just skipped it in favor of listing some examples
2013-02-19 05006, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: I might file a bug at some point to request that AR attributes be listed on the stats page though
2013-02-19 05009, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: I guess maybe I’m not catching a difference between “easy to understand” which I think is not so easy to achieve for us, since musicbrainz is a complex system on a complex topic — and “easy to use” which covers the actual tools and what you have to do with them to achieve a given change in the system’s state.
2013-02-19 05036, 2013
hawke_1
(the latter has a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit, I think)
2013-02-19 05017, 2013
ianmcorvidae
my point isn't that pursuing "ease of use" is *wrong* per se, but that "ease of understanding" is usually the first victim of a quest to make something easier to use
2013-02-19 05027, 2013
nikki thinks easy to use has various components
2013-02-19 05037, 2013
ianmcorvidae
or, well, that ease of understanding is the easiest route to ease of use
2013-02-19 05037, 2013
hawke_1
sure, because a lot of things want to hide those details.
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
hawke_1
Like we often talk about hiding the details of masters because most people don’t know/care about them.
2013-02-19 05002, 2013
ianmcorvidae
and you're right that we can't really make our system much easier to understand -- or less complicated to understand, at least
2013-02-19 05023, 2013
nikki
like the relationship editor is easy to use for me because it has lots of functionality but it's hard to use for me because there's so much stuff on the page
2013-02-19 05030, 2013
nikki
the latter is kinda hard to fix. it's hard to edit relationships without showing them, but showing them makes a lot of releases scroll right off the bottom :/
2013-02-19 05058, 2013
nikki
(it's basically exactly what I hate about inline relationships on release pages XD)
2013-02-19 05004, 2013
ianmcorvidae
but yeah, I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue ease of use, I'm saying we need to be more specific so we don't inadvertently become theaudiodb by removing our complexity in the short-term pursuit of ease of use
2013-02-19 05036, 2013
hawke_1
I think theaudiodb has a lot going for it in some respects (mainly ease-of-use) ;-)
2013-02-19 05044, 2013
hawke_1
e.g. their search works a lot better than ours
2013-02-19 05048, 2013
ianmcorvidae
yeah, but their data model is hilariously bad :P
2013-02-19 05000, 2013
hawke_1
or I should say “easy to use”
2013-02-19 05011, 2013
hawke_1
our actual search results are mostly OK.
2013-02-19 05041, 2013
hawke_1
but the whole “you must select what entity you’re looking for” thing is just silly. :-)
2013-02-19 05045, 2013
ianmcorvidae has an amusing thought where I wonder if we could bulk-order large monitors to sell them at lower prices to MB editors so they can see more stuff on a page :P
2013-02-19 05041, 2013
nikki
hawke_1: speaking of which, would you mix the results or search everything but display results separated by entity type?
2013-02-19 05004, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: I think mixing the results is the only viable thing…
2013-02-19 05008, 2013
nikki
heh
2013-02-19 05019, 2013
Leftmost
I'm not sure. Discogs has it nicely set up right now.
2013-02-19 05023, 2013
nikki
guess we won't be getting that any time soon then :(
2013-02-19 05037, 2013
Leftmost
Returns results of all kinds, but displays results separated by type.
2013-02-19 05038, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: Otherwise you’d have to somehow have subsections, or scroll past all the works to get to the recordings or whatever.
2013-02-19 05044, 2013
Leftmost
At least in their autocomplete.
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
nikki
yeah exactly! the latter is exactly why I hate the idea
2013-02-19 05006, 2013
Leftmost
Jump links?
2013-02-19 05014, 2013
nikki
it's stupid to show barely matching artist results first if there's an exact work match
2013-02-19 05016, 2013
ianmcorvidae
that's just a workaround :P
2013-02-19 05023, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: +1
2013-02-19 05031, 2013
hawke_1
Leftmost: discogs search is fucking terrible
2013-02-19 05034, 2013
Ben\Sput joined the channel
2013-02-19 05052, 2013
Leftmost
hawke_1, their autocomplete works relatively well, and certainly a lot better than ours.
2013-02-19 05014, 2013
hawke_1
Leftmost: Looks like they only have three entities too?
2013-02-19 05015, 2013
Leftmost
Searching for things outside of autocomplete sucks, yes.
2013-02-19 05025, 2013
kepstin-work
to get the mixed search to work right, we'd have to create a new search index over "everything together"
2013-02-19 05041, 2013
kepstin-work
which might be tricky to code well :)
2013-02-19 05058, 2013
nikki
anyway, a search over all entities was already implemented in the search, but nobody's done an interface for it. I started but gave up about 5 minutes later once I realised it wasn't possible to use the results to display mixed results
2013-02-19 05003, 2013
hawke_1
Leftmost: Sorry, but when I type “Beatles” and their autocomplete doesn’t have the beatles listed? That’s fucking terrible.
2013-02-19 05015, 2013
hawke_1
nikki: Yeah, I remember that being the case. :-(
2013-02-19 05018, 2013
Leftmost
hawke_1, I said "relatively". I didn't say it was a shining example.
2013-02-19 05020, 2013
kepstin-work
the current method does separate searches over the individual indexes for each type
2013-02-19 05040, 2013
ianmcorvidae
weird how most prepackaged search things *default* to searching like that
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
ianmcorvidae
elasticsearch, for example, defaults to the '_all' pseudo-index, which searches all indexes
2013-02-19 05012, 2013
Leftmost
Why is that weird?
2013-02-19 05013, 2013
ianmcorvidae
our separated-by-index system is the outlier at this point :P
2013-02-19 05016, 2013
hawke_1 tries out theaudiodb’s search.
2013-02-19 05018, 2013
ianmcorvidae
Leftmost: I'm being sarcastic :P)
2013-02-19 05019, 2013
kepstin-work
ianmcorvidae: well, musicbrainz isn't using any prepackaged search things ;)
2013-02-19 05024, 2013
Leftmost
Ahh.
2013-02-19 05037, 2013
ianmcorvidae
kepstin-work: yes, of course we aren't -- I'm saying that we're behind the rest of the world because of it
2013-02-19 05001, 2013
hawke_1
theaudiodb searches all and splits results into columns.
2013-02-19 05017, 2013
ianmcorvidae
hawke_1: columns by entity type (or their equivalent of entity type, whatever)?
2013-02-19 05022, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: yeah.
2013-02-19 05038, 2013
hawke_1
which wouldn’t work well for us I think because we have too many entity types.
2013-02-19 05000, 2013
ianmcorvidae
for columns to work, yeah
2013-02-19 05009, 2013
drsaunde joined the channel
2013-02-19 05013, 2013
hawke_1
we could possibly get away with (release group, artist, recording, work, label)
2013-02-19 05022, 2013
hawke_1
but that’s five, and that’s unwieldy.
2013-02-19 05026, 2013
ianmcorvidae
I mean, unless you're using a search term that only gets hits in a few of the columns
2013-02-19 05033, 2013
ianmcorvidae
but you can't guarantee that :/
2013-02-19 05046, 2013
hawke_1
ianmcorvidae: with our search? Just about everything gets a hit
2013-02-19 05017, 2013
ianmcorvidae
I dunno, most searches I do would only get hits in a few indexes
2013-02-19 05029, 2013
hawke_1
which is …kinda bad, but kinda good: we rarely have “no results found”, but we also get a lot of useless results.
2013-02-19 05036, 2013
ianmcorvidae
heh
2013-02-19 05050, 2013
ianmcorvidae
I think this may have more to do with the searches you're doing, I get no results all the damn time
2013-02-19 05051, 2013
Leftmost
At least our top results are usually the ones we want.
2013-02-19 05023, 2013
hawke_1
1 million recording results for “you belong to my heart” is just silly. :-)
2013-02-19 05054, 2013
nikki
kepstin-work: the problem is actually just the scoring. a label search for "morning musume" returns 100 for "morning records" even though only 50% of the search terms match only 50% of the entity name :( you can't combine them by score since the scores are some arbitrary thing that seems to resemble "how close is this to #1" rather than "how good is this match" :/
2013-02-19 05057, 2013
hawke_1
especially when the last page has a score of 0, with stuff like “the marching” by “hostages for smack”
2013-02-19 05039, 2013
kepstin-work
nikki: yes; the only solution to that is to add a new index on the search server which combines all of the data.
2013-02-19 05014, 2013
hawke_1
I mean, I can’t even see the connection between the search query and the (last page of) the result.
2013-02-19 05019, 2013
nikki
well, using a different scoring system would also be a solution :P perhaps not as easy to implement but still
2013-02-19 05029, 2013
hawke_1
There is literally no word in common between the two.
