music UX

YouTube recently changed their web UI - with a cleaner look and emphasis on recommended content and they do a good job of highlighting new features during your first visit.  However, when it came to finding my playlists, that was unnecessarily challenging. Despite there being only two choices in the left navigation (Guide and More Results), I didn't expect my playlists to be located in a 'guide' and I had to expand the area to see them - I think this area (left, especially given only two items there) should be expanded by default so I can see all of the options right away.  When I eventually navigated to my Playlist 1, I wanted to delete a few videos but that took seriously too much time.  The visibility of the Edit Playlist button (below) was poor - placed above a brown deleted video notification and the playlist header AND it was colored in black on a dark gray/black gradiated background (there should be more contrast!).  After clicking the button to invoke the edi

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 reall