"If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in
your online Google account, it starts playing
immediately, rather than being added to the queue as
you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re
not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist;
you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it."
Who thought that this possibly was a good idea or an acceptable way to release the product?
No, it's not OK to explain that you must use a popup menu to add it. It's plain fucked up. It means that someone, all too easily, can mess up the current playlist by tapping at a song. One little movement with your finger and you just ruined the mood by cutting the tune. You can't trust shit like this. People will be afraid to open up the playlist. This strikes me as just thrown together enough to work, but not designed to actually work well, in every sense of the word.
Spotify on iPhone works this way as well. Tap a song while playing a different one, and the new song immediately starts to play. Swipe to the right and press the playlist icon and it gets added to the queue. I've messed up song requests, to the ire of friends listening.
Indeed. In my humble opinion, the correct solution for something like this is the safe one: When an item is tapped, present the choices for what to do with it.
over-reacting a little? it takes 1x to realize you just cut into someone else's song and about 10 seconds after that to figure out how to add them to the Q instead.
I would definitely make that mistake multiple times if
I was drunk at a party. If there was a lot of crap music at the party, I might even use it as an excuse for 'accidentally' changing the music.
Multiply that by the number of party participants with Android that are also trying to add their song. And this action is a bit unintuitive, so I wouldn't be surprised to see people make the same mistake multiple times (not so much if the party is filled with HN readers, but the average Android reader definitely).
No, it's not OK to explain that you must use a popup menu to add it. It's plain fucked up. It means that someone, all too easily, can mess up the current playlist by tapping at a song. One little movement with your finger and you just ruined the mood by cutting the tune. You can't trust shit like this. People will be afraid to open up the playlist. This strikes me as just thrown together enough to work, but not designed to actually work well, in every sense of the word.