music UX

iOS 6 was released several weeks ago and included many new UI enhancements including Maps, a separate Podcasts app and removal of the native YouTube app.  Most of the changes are good improvements but some, specifically to iTunes Match have made the management of songs difficult and frustrating.  First, you cannot download one song at a time any more, only entire albums.  And it's not clear why Apple decided to change this. Not only does downloading entire albums take up more precious storage on my iPhone but the inflexibility is frustrating and it seems like the only workaround is by adding individual songs to a playlist - not ideal or intuitive.  Second (and probably the most egregious issue) is that you cannot delete any songs from your library without first turning off iTunes Match.  Not only is this completely unintuitive but once you turn Match back on, your library is automatically wiped clean. You used to be able to quickly add or delete indivi...

Although Lollapalooza has been around for 20+ years now and has expanded into other countries like Brazil, Chile and (2013) Israel, this was the first year we made it to the three-day festival in Chicago. And since it was our first time there, we wanted to make sure we could plan our day well - get around Grant Park quickly, quickly find our favorite bands, the food, beer, bathrooms.  We used the festival's official iPhone app which provided many features while keeping the experience simple.  Overall, navigation worked well, most features exceeded expectations and the workflow of creating a schedule (albeit short) was great.  However, explanation of the Group Text feature and phone coverage (which wasn't the app's fault but still had a major impact on the user experience) must be improved.   Here's a breakdown of the best and worst features of the app's user experience: BEST 1. Lineup tab and ability to add artists to our schedule - I could easily se...

Since the Kindle Fire uses the Android platform and all of my music is located on a Mac/iTunes using iTunes Match, I expected there to be a small challenge transferring songs to the Fire but I Google'd 'transferring songs to a Kindle Fire', found an overview of the process on Amazon and seemed like the steps would be fairly simple. However, the overall workflow was cumbersome and confusing. I read the instructions and (after logging into Amazon ) followed a link to the Amazon Cloud home.  I quickly noticed a clear call to action - an 'Upload Files' button in TWO locations on the screen and it was a well-organized screen (although it wasn't clear what Lists was, on the left side).  And uploading files seemed fairly intuitive and flexible by 1) control-clicking the file and choosing 'Upload to Cloud Drive', 2) dragging them to a Cloud Drive icon in the menu bar or 3) clicking the Upload Files button which invoked the native Mac folder w...

YouTube is great for so many reasons - mostly the ability to play any song on demand for free. In light of the all of the free streaming music (Spotify, Mog and Rdio) services out there, Youtube has been doing this for a long time. Create playlists, share music with your friends, watch videos on your iPhone or a device connected to your TV - you can take the free music wherever you want. I recently found a video for 'How to Live Alone (With the Dogs)' by The Pernice Brothers. Since their collection is hard to find (at least on Amazon and iTunes, I haven't called Laurie's in Lincoln Square yet), you can imagine how excited I was to be able to find it, play it several times and even share it with friends. After watching the video, I wanted to leave a comment telling the world where I first heard it! But what should have been an easy task wasn't a good experience at all. When it comes to usability in products, my favori...

Spotify was recently launched to the US audience after (literally) years of waiting. The UI is great and hasn't changed much since I reviewed it a while back . In short, it's clean, efficient and easy to use building on the familiar look of iTunes and other on-demand apps. One thing i had not looked at until now is Spotify's social component. A major aspect of most music apps, they've done a really good job with its user experience for several reasons: 1. Quick access to your connections in a persistent People panel on the right side from which you can access their playlists (the location makes your friends feel more integrated than in other apps like Pandora, although that may change when the new Pandora UI is released), 2. Ability to efficiently share via several social media from the same modal dialog - the usual suspects Facebook and Twitter are here but also IM and Spofity, of course, 3. Bright blue color to distinguish the primary action buttons (Share...