music UX

One of the things I love about Spotify's mobile app is how easy it is to create and manage song playlists. Users get several contextual options while listening to a song including 'Add to...' (below) which begins a quick playlist management flow. So, what about iOS7 and music? Have you ever, while listening to a song on your iPhone, wanted to quickly create a playlist (say, workout, cookout) from it or add it to an existing playlist? You can't do it spontaneously, right on the fly, in the context of the song - you have to navigate away from the song, to Playlists and either create a brand new playlist or select an existing one, then click Songs, locate the song currently playing, click the Add icon, Done and then you click Now Playing to go back to the song playing again. It just interrupts the user experience and doesn't match the model users have when it comes to playlist management. It's much more fun (and intuitive) to add a song to a playlist quickly,...

Slacker just made a major change to flat design (for the better!). Did they have a non-flat, skeumorphic look in the past? Well, it wasn't as bad as Apple's iPad newsstand or reel-to-reel podcast metaphor but they used plenty of gradients and even a speaker-grill texture (below) on both sides of the web app almost to suggest 'hey, this is a music app!' Consumers don't need those cues designed to look like the real world anymore - they need a simple, clean design to communicate intended use of the product and that's where flat design comes in. The new Slacker design achieves that - it's ditched the black and heavily-textured interface for a clean, white design with large, readable type and simple, pictogram-style iconography. Although, there are some drop shadows to give the UI depth, the overall look is well-organized and the flat design allows me to find things (like the Create Station and My Music features) quickly. Not to mention the a...

CHIRP Radio is a great, listener-supported online radio station in Chicago and I listen to it often, either on the web or from my iPhone. They recently redesigned their website and it does several things very well. First, the updated visual design engages users with large album art and navigation options.  Second, users can now create an account to personalize their experience - you can add your favorite tracks to your music collection, RSVP to upcoming CHIRP Radio events and participate in discussion forums with other CHIRP listeners.  Finally, the overall design is mobile-device friendly .  They decided to use a responsive design for the site which gives a consistent experience for users no matter what device (web, tablet, phone) they use to access the site.  Responsive design uses flexible grids, flexible images and media queries to adjust the layout of the site depending on what device you use. Besides giving the user a consistent experience, it can also ...

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 ...

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...