As part of their effort to mimic the appearance of the hand-held consumer device, the designers of the QuickTime 4.0 Player employed "drawer-like" interface elements. The most notable of these, and unquestionably the single biggest blunder in the design of the application (other than attempting to mimic a physical device) is the Favorites Drawer. The Favorites Drawer is intended to provide the user rapid access to his or her favorite multimedia files. By that concept alone, it should be a useful interface feature. Unfortunately, by virtue of attempting to mimic real-world devices, and due to a complete lack of familiarity with basic design principles, the Favorites Drawer in QuickTime is a dismal failure. The designers provided a smooth animation to give the appearance of the drawer opening at the bottom of the device, much like, one supposes, a panel might open on a hand-held device, and very much like the phone number "drawer" used in IBM's RealPhone. The drawer demonstrates one distinct problem of translating real-world phenomena to the computer desktop: real-world phenomena are not subject to the constraints of screen size. The extent to which the drawer can "open", and therefore the number of items visible in the drawer, is a function of where the player is located in relation to the bottom of the screen. If you want to hold more than a few items in the drawer, you'll have to first position the player near the top of the screen. If you want to hold a lot of items in the drawer, you'll have to increase the resolution of your monitor. If the player is positioned too close to the bottom of the screen, the drawer will simply not open. Similarly, the current size of the player can interfere with the user's ability to access items in the Favorites Drawer; if the size of the player is increased, there is less screen real estate into which the drawer can open and therefore, fewer items in the drawer are accessible. These problems would not exist if the designers had employed a standard pop-up window to contain the user's favorites. These problems are the direct, expected results of dogmatic adherence to a faulty design philosophy. By restricting themselves to the real-world metaphor, and not availing themselves of the dynamic features that computers provide, the designers needlessly restricted the utility and usability of the software. A look at the arrangement of items in the drawers demonstrates another fundamental problem with the translation of physical devices to software. The favorites are arranged in a matrix, the number of elements of which is limited by the size of the screen. A physical item is limited by its physical size. A virtual item, such as a list of phone-numbers or favorites, is limited only by the amount of computer memory. If the designers had provided a standard list box there would be virtually no limit to the number of favorites that a user could maintain. Furthermore, by availing themselves of other standard GUI elements, the designers could have provided a great deal of additional functionality such as organizing favorites by whatever constructs the user wishes to employ, or creating a PlayList of items to be played successively. Computer software is the ideal platform on which to offer such functionality, but because of their adherence to the physical device, the designers of the QuickTime 4.0 Player, like other RealThings apologists, have made their software woefully inept in an area in which it should greatly excel. The images in the Favorites Drawer, despite their appearance, are not entirely meaningless. The QuickTime 4.0 Player assigns an image to those items that represent sound files. All sound files however, will be assigned the same image, and the program provides no means by which the user can substitute a meaningful image. On the other hand, the image used to represent a given movie is a thumbnail image of the first frame of the movie. On the surface, this may seem appropriate, until one looks at a collection of movies: most of the movies we downloaded, especially those from Apple, begin with a blank, black screen. The first frame of the remainining movies constituted a copyright notice which is especially unrecognizeable when reduced to thumbnail size. What were they thinking? The images in the drawer indicate little more than the fact that the drawer contains items. For some completely inexplicable reason, the designers did not feel that it was important to display a title or other description of the item itself, nor did the designers provide any secondary means in the drawer itself, such as tooltips, balloon help, or a message in a status bar to distinguish various titles. This is not a result of the inappropriate application of a real-world metaphor; this is simply pitiful design. Balloon Help would certainly help the user, but it would still require the user to pass the cursor over each image until the desired target could be located. Since Balloon Help requires intervention of the user to be effective, it should be regarded as little more than a quick fix and not a substitute for an appropriate design of the Favorites function. The lack of meaningful descriptions for the items forces the user to rely on the physical position of the item in the matrix. Unfortunately, if the user resizes the player window, the number of images in each row of the drawer may or may not change. The end result is that the user can no longer rely on image position as an aid to identification. An item that was the third row from the bottom, might, after resizing, appear in the second row. Because of the lack of labels and reliable positioning information, selecting a particular movie or sound file from the favorites drawer is not unlike trying to find a caramel-filled chocolate from a sampler box of chocolates. As expressed by Forest Gump in the movie bearing his name: Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates,

you never know what you are going to get. The only reliable means of finding a particular type of chocolate is to either bite into each, or at least press your thumb into the bottom of each and hope that nobody notices later. Similarly, the only reliable means with which the user can identify a file of choice in the favorites drawer is to open several until he or she happens upon the file of interest. If the designers had been concerned with the users' objectives at this point of the interaction with the QuickTime 4.0 Player, specifically, the ability to rapidly locate and open a particular file of interest, the favorites drawer would never have seen the light of day. Unfortunately, the designers were far more interested in form over function, where "looking good" is considered more important than working well. The application does provide additional means to determine the names of one's favorite media files, but the user must go somewhere else. The application's menu bar offers a function labelled "Organize Favorites", which when selected provides a standard listbox containing the names of the favorites. The listbox allows the user to rename favorites, delete favorites from the list, and reorder items in the list; these functions are notably unavailable from the Favorites Drawer itself. The Organize Favorites dialog is not without its own design problems. Surprisingly, the Organize Favorites dialog does not allow the user to Add favorites to the list, for that, the user has to ...go somewhere else. Items in the list can be reordered, but no indication is provided that this is possible. Further, as an example of a failure to pay attention in GUI 101, the designers do not allow the user to make multiple selections in the listbox; you cannot delete more than one item at a time, nor move more than one item at a time. (Additional design inadequacies of the dialog are discussed below). Those limitations aside, all the designers need to do is add the ability to launch a favorite from the Organize Favorites dialog, change the title of the dialog to "Favorites", and burn the source code for the drawer. In so doing, they will exponentially improve the utility and usability of the Favorites function. Then, after the designers complete GUI 201, they might want to provide the user the ability to organize the favorites into categories, export groups of favorites to share with others, add the ability to create a playlist, and open a favorite in a new window. When you are dealing with a computer and not a real-world physical device just about anything is possible.