After 10 minutes of playing with it tonight, there are a bunch of positives to report. Information navigation is much more contextual in it’s nature, the visual design is much cleaner and there’s an interesting addition of an activity feed at play (think News Feed from Facebook).
That said, there are a few major pain points remaining.
Search Is Doing Too Much For Its Own Good
I tried to get to Molly’s artist page by using each of these queries:
- molly mcginn
- Molly McGinn
- “molly mcginn”
- “Molly McGinn”
Normally, I don’t worry about proper capitalization when searching, but Last.fm has always been finicky like that, so I figured that hadn’t changed. It looks like that has been fixed, but now the results are much worse. Now a search for “Molly McGinn” — an explicit bit of structured data in the Last.fm database — doesn’t return her in the results until page 2:
It seems as though someone decided that marketing trumps precision in a search result. If you click on the image, you can see that the return of artist matches seems to be based on popularity. Popularity is a great search filter or sorting criteria, but implemented as the default driver of relevancy?
That’s a terrible user experience.
Page By Page Players?
The Last.fm embedded player strategy must have been hatched with the end goal of driving downloads of the player/scrobbling software. Not embedding the site player in a manner that allows for navigation across the site without losing the stream — you often launch a new Last.fm window when trying to navigate from a radio page — is very problematic.
While there’s a bunch of great information on a radio page about the artist, group or tag, similar artists, listeners, nearby artist events, etc., the display of this information shouldn’t be driving the listening experience across the domain. It literally makes me stay on one page to hear my station, instead of following me across multiple pages.
Why not design the player experience so that it lives in a thin, consistent frame and when someone wants more contextual details about the song, artists, group, etc., they can puppet the info display into the page through an explicit interaction with the player?
Playing music on the site kills my experience moving about, adding info to the site or discovering new music. I literally have to make a choice: listen to the end of the song or do what I need to do on another page.
Last.fm already has my $3 per month, so maybe my pain doesn’t matter, but when non-subscribers get this redesign it might impact traffic numbers when it comes to the bottom-line.
Beta Review Wrap
Last.fm’s contextual navigation is great — I’m able to discover new music in a variety of ways– and I really dig most of the re-organization of features, along with the new UI presentation.
But getting search right is essential to a majority of my tasks on the site. Along with the implementation of the music player, this current iteration has me leaning towards stamping a huge FAIL on the beta release.
Add Your Perspective