Napster Beta Feedback [Thoughts]

Source: Napster, Online Music

Back in late October 2009 (October 20, 2009 to be exact) I was invited to beta test the new Napster Web interface. Without seeing it I was excited to see how it looked and functioned. After all, it really needed to be updated to include more features as well as have basic info (such as the artist’s genre). You can go to http://music.napster.com/ or click below to see how it looks now, but this was the screenshot where I got my first reaction:

Below is my original feedback sent to Napster on October 30, 2009. Sadly, when looking at the interface this morning it doesn’t look like much has changed. Seriously? It’s been almost eight months since I took the time to write all of my comments and the only things they changed are the minor ones?!?!

I’m really hoping that the PC software for Napster doesn’t follow suit. If you agree with me about how the new interface isn’t ready, let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

When writing this post I decided to use IE 7 (don’t worry, my browser of choice is Firefox) and it looks like they still haven’t fixed the third bug I mentioned below. However, it looks like a new one appeared as a result of the “Search for your favorite artist” section right on the main page. You can click the image to see the full version. (Yes, I realize that the “submit” text over the “Search” image is very anal, but still, don’t they have UI experts checking these things?)

OK, I’ve said enough for now. Without further ado, here’s my original message sent to the Napster team (with recent updates).

Sent to Napster on October 30, 2009:

DESIGN

• One of my first impressions about the current Napster interface was the light and clean interface. Unlike Rhapsody (which I previously used) everything was well laid out and easy on the eyes. At first the beta design looked great but after using it I feel it’s too dark — maybe change it to the current look and feel or offer a light/dark option?
• I feel that the interface is way too big and clunky (speed). It needs to be slimmed down (make the row height of each item the same as the text in it) and limit the amount of scrolling.
• When looking at the list of songs, the album and artist information should be to the right instead of below to view more songs on the page at once.

MEDIA PLAYER

• Allow the ability to resize the window. I had a toolbar that I had to manually hide in order to see the ‘TAKE ME BACK TO NAPSTER’ button
• It would be great if you showed the artist, song, and album (including year) in the window title so I could just hover over the button in the taskbar to see what’s playing
• Why not have previous song, play/pause, and next song buttons in this window? It would be nice to not have to open the main Napster window to click those.

SHARING

• How do you share an artist, album, or track with this interface? If it’s possible, it isn’t clear how to do it.
  UPDATE: It’s now possible to share a track via Twitter or Facebook, which is good, but what about email or HTML? And for the life of me I have no idea how to share a playlist. Anyone?

SUGGESTION

• I like that you now show the genre for each album, but what has been needed for some time is to show the genre for artists. If two have the same name, the genre needs to appear like this: Artist [Genre]. A perfect example of why this is essential is when you search for the artist Lunch Money. As you’ll see, it shows that it’s the same artist but there are actually two—one is a band that plays children’s music and the other is a rapper.

BUGS

• Looks like there can be a delay when typing into any textbox when:
  • Searching for music
  • Entering a playlist name
• It shouldn’t be necessary to start with “the” when an artist’s name begins with that word. It should show results based on the word(s) after that.
  UPDATE: What I mean by this is the automatic results that appear as you type. For instance, if you start typing “arcade fire” no results automatically appear, but if you start typing “the arcade fire” results show up immediately.
• When hovering over the play button on a header row with the black gradient background it shifts to the left a bit (in Internet Explorer)

STREAMING

• There were several occasions where the music would cut out for a few seconds, then resume. I don’t know if this is an issue with my computer or browser (Internet Explorer 7) but I wanted to mention it anyway.

QUEUE

• How do I delete multiple songs from the queue? If I click on one it starts to play, and when I press Shift to select multiple items and press the [Delete] key it doesn’t work.
• There should be a confirmation when clicking the ‘X Clear All’ button
• I’m not sure what happened but after switching to another window then back to the Napster beta site and clicking the ‘QUEUE’ button all of the song rows were blank — only the track numbers showed. When I clicked the play button the song information then appeared but only for that song. I needed to collapse the queue then load it for them all to appear again.