10.2: Setlist Creator Sorting

When we design a panel or a menu, we spend a lot of time thinking about the way it’s organized. We want to put the most important information and functions in the most visible or easily accessible places, and work our way out from there. This can be a difficult balance to strike, but it becomes even more troublesome when adding features to an existing interface. Maintaining familiar positioning of all existing elements while adding new elements that don’t feel out of place can be tricky, and the Setlist Editor is a good example of this.

For the Setlist Editor, we created two columns: your setlist on the left, and a score browser on the right. That score browser was essentially a duplicate of forScore’s main menu, showing all of your categories like specific composers and genres, and allowing you to select one to see its scores.

Consistent feedback from customers told us that this didn’t go far enough, however, and that more people expected to see the complete list of scores from the start. The ability to browse by category was still essential, so we blended these ideas together to try and get the best of both worlds. The main menu shows all of your scores by default, and it can show a list of your composers, genres, tags, or labels—just like you’d expect.

Things got a little more complicated because, unlike most score lists which use the sort bar at the top to let you change how the list is ordered, the sort bar in this case was already used to switch between the “All Scores” list and the different types of categories. So in forScore 10.2 we worked around this awkward limitation by adding sort options as a button in the top left-hand corner of the menu instead. When the “All Scores” list is visible in this root menu, tap this button to change the list’s sort order. It looks a little different, but it works the same way.