emusic updates: browse
As you may have noticed, we made quite a few revisions to our Browse feature today! Here’s a roundup of the changes -
- A fresh design, which makes album artwork larger and more prominent
- A fresh new Browse homepage that is easier to navigate
- Music Genre and Audiobooks homepages that place a greater emphasis on editorial features
- Browse Editorial is easier to both read and navigate
- You now have the ability to save albums for later directly from browse pages
- A new Viewing menu, which grows as you add filters while allowing you to delete any filters to adjust the results
- Drop-downs for sorting/viewing results for a cleaner interface
- Tha ability to adjust how many albums are displayed per browse page — so now, on those especially massive New Release Tuesdays, you can view 100 albums at once!
Really loving the new layout!
Definitely looks better! HOWEVER…the lack of columns makes it far more difficult to scroll quickly looking by Artist Name. I know you can sort by artist, but then you lose everything else (album name, cover art, arrival date etc). It’s not that big of a deal, but after seven years of daily perusing it’s going to radically change how I search. Like most changes, there’s some good and some challenges.
Well, it LOOKS nice…but after a couple of days using it for my normal daily eMusic browsing & searching, it seems like very little usability testing went into the new design. Many of the simplest tasks now require extra clicks each time (with no way to save browsing preferences, ie, smaller cover art) and some key sorting features are either gone or un-findable.
Not quite a FAIL…but as a piece of user-focused web design, not really very good, either.
sigh, i used to recommend, even ‘evangelize’ eMusic…
but that was years ago & it has never lived up to it’s promise…
or been as good as it should be…and the new ‘glossier’ interface hasn’t really improved anything has it?
that won’t stop eMusic from patting itself on the back…
ifirst impression is that the pale aqua blue lettering under the album titles is harder to read than the old typeface…
the best way to find the new albums for years, sortable by label, artist etc has been to go to some autobot page set up here: http://www.diehippiedie.com/emusic/dogmusic.php
sad but true
I think it is a big deal – it obviously wasn’t user-tested with regards to actual, substantive browsing, which is now substantially hampered and significantly more inefficient. These kinds of (anti-)utilitarian blunders are near inexcusable, imo.
Haven’t spent a lot of time with the changes yet, but my first impression is: Why haven’t there been any new Dozens since November 2009?
Have to agree with post number 2. The prominence given to the sleeves makes it much more difficult to plough through the freshly ripped titles – ideally the artist, title, genre and label should be spread out, given more prominence and an equal billing sizewise. Kind of, um, like the old layout..