Horizontal Volume Control in Apple Music — But Why?
Dear Apple Music Team,
I recently tried Apple Music iOS app, everything is great, top quality, but the one annoying thing is the always-visible horizontal volume control. More than a personal opinion, I believe this design choice leads to usability issues.
The volume control and the seekbar appears on the "now playing" screen, and both of them have similar appearance. Due to this design, users can "seek" the track by accidentally dragging the volume control instead of the seek bar, which can raise the volume up to unbearable levels. Even accidental interactions with the screen can do this. Also, if Apple Music is playing a live radio station, the seek bar is not available, so accidentally "seeking" there means they are essentially moving the volume control itself.
Interestingly, the Android version of the app doesn't have this horizontal volume control, while the iOS version does. Here are screenshots from the respective app stores for reference:
This choice may be rooted in historical design decisions — I see the same horizontal volume control without any indications in the old iTunes screenshot. But we always don't have to stick with historical design decisions, right?
Every iPhone and iPad has physical volume buttons. Most of the earphones today have built-in volume controls. Thus, adding an on-screen volume control is somewhat redundant today.
Please either remove it, make it optional behind a setting for legacy users, or simply put it behind a hold-to-reveal volume icon, where users have to deliberately press and hold the icon to reveal a vertical volume slider to adjust the volume.
Thanks,
An almost-broke-my-eardrums user.