Paulo Ávila

The iPod Shuffle is a wonderful little product and in my opinion is by far the best mp3 player that doesn’t display information about what is playing. But there is an element of its design that I consider to be flawed and which I attribute to Apple’s consistent choice to sacrifice options for the sake of simplicity.

One of the two switches on the iPod Shuffle chooses the play mode: either Continuous Playback or Shuffle. The former will repeatedly loop through all the songs in the order that they were added to the iPod from iTunes. The Shuffle mode will obviously play through them randomly, but will it stop playing after all the songs have been played through once? Are Shuffle and Continuous Playback mutually exclusive?

This conflict seems minor, but there might be a major design flaw here. A switch is a user interface element that chooses between two possibilities. Ideally, neither choice implies the other (or else a different user interface element would be used…more about this later). But in the case of the iPod Shuffle, the Shuffle mode implies continuous playback as well. And I agree that it should—it’s intuitive to me that Shuffle would also continuously loop through all the songs. But with the current setup (), however, moving the switch from Continuous Playback to Shuffle is contradictory. I would have at least made the symbol something like: or .

You might now be saying to yourself: “That’s all fine and dandy because the current symbols on either side of the switch are simply graphical representations of two preset modes: one that continuously loops through the songs in order and another that continuously loops through the songs but in a random order.” Well, let’s not be so quick to make that assumption because as much as I’d agree with you, that’s not the way iTunes does it. iTunes uses buttons to select the mode allowing the user to turn both Shuffle and Continuous Playback on at the same time.

And let’s not kid ourselves that it is ok to have iTunes do something different than all the iPods out there. Apple’s success with their line of mp3 players (as well as their other products) is almost entirely attributable the almost necessary connection between their hardware and software components.