Rdio updates its app with visual design, navigation flyout

Rdio already does a lot of things right, like highlighting new features for users on the web. With mobile, they've always been trailing other music apps a bit in terms of visual design but with their latest version, the look and feel is greatly improved with a cleaner interface and modern font. And the new left-hand flyout (used by many other apps like Facebook and YouTube) is a convenient way to access all of the navigation options in one place.

However, as useful as the flyout is, it's not always available from every screen and this really impacts how quickly you can access Search. For example, while listening to any song, it takes four clicks to get back to Search.

I believe searching while listening to a song is a real use case - so I would strongly suggest a persistent search icon like YouTube (left) has on the top right of their mobile app header. This would let users access Search from any screen in the app.

Despite the issue around Search, Rdio did a really nice job with the recent updates and made the user experience much better.

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music UX