Mambo: a facet-based zoomable music browser

ABSTRACT

Current mobile music players and managers rely on scrolling long and hierarchically structured lists of items. They do not scale well to various screen sizes. As a solution, this paper introduces Mambo for browsing personal music collections on mobile and other devices. Songs, albums, or artists can be browsed and filtered according to different hierarchical metadata facets such as time, genre, or alphabet. The FacetZoom widget constitutes the basic metaphor and combines visual faceted browsing with zoomable user interfaces. To search, browse, and filter data in a consistent way, we contribute both a continuous multi-scale and a discrete tap-and-center navigation which is especially suited for mobile devices. A 24-subject formative user study was conducted, investigating the first prototype under PDA and Ultra Mobile PC display conditions using two design variants. The results indicate that the facet-based zooming approach scales well to various display sizes.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Graphical user interfaces