Soundcloud is my go-to example of bad UI design that has progressively worsened over the years. This, though, would be a step in the right direction!<p>Bigger than their UI problems, though, are their <i>UX</i> problems. I don't care what the site looks like as long as I could have three features:<p>1) no comments from strangers, ever. (they are mostly spam or content-less)
2) no auto-advance when I am viewing the page of a single track. (it often advances to tracks by artists I to whom I don't even subscribe)
3) let me sort every list I can produce. (the current sort of artist pages seems to be an incomplete bogosort)
Most of the solutions are great improvements! However, I don't think the global feature switch for comments is where it belongs, and I hope nobody forces the rounded mask on my album art just because of UI aesthetic.<p>I could live with the current SoundCloud version if the infinite scroll were changed back to regular pagination. Prolonged site usage heats up MacBooks. It would be interesting to pull off an iOS-like, high-performance scrolling algorithm that recycles a limited number of rendered objects, But I haven't seen anything like that with Backbone Models and Views.
I wish SoundCloud wouldn't transcode anything it gets into MP3 for playback. It ruins the quality. Yeah, they let you download the original, but playback through the site suffers if you upload Ogg/Vorbis for example. At least they could provide playback in original form to browsers which support it, and use MP3 as fallback for more crippled ones (like Safari or IE). Since they obviously host the original and transcoded file it shouldn't be hard to do.<p>Also, Opus support could be useful.
This looks good! My current biggest critique of the soundcloud site is the search itself - I can never find what I'm looking for. There should be an ability to order results by popularity so I don't have to look through 50 random remixes of a song before I can get to the original.
Visually conflating buttons and an input field (search) in the new header concept is a horrible design solution. I really feel like unbounded inputs (giving the user no visual clues of the boundaries of the input until they click into it) is an anti-pattern that I hope will die out soon.<p>I'm not suggesting I love soundcloud's UI in any way ideal, but neither is this in many other ways.
I made my version of a front-end for soundcloud. It is for when you have a large amount favorites, but it also can get to your playlists and artist pages. I found that once you've liked over 200 songs on soundcloud it gets really hard to view your older favorites. My client loads my ~1100 favorites and a few seconds. You can also:
* sort by a different criteria
* shuffle all your favorites or a playlist at once
* add multiple songs to playlists by holding alt, clicking the songs, then clicking the playlist
* make a queue by holding shift and clicking songs<p>It is a side project and is by no means done, has a few bugs, and the initial load can be weird (still fast though). Feel free to give me some feedback.<p>sctunes.meteor.com
Very nice work!<p>BTW, the player buttons used to be in the top bar, and the search was smaller. I could not for the life of me understand why they moved it down...<p>I disagree with the comments suggestion - it's a feature probably stemming from the fact that the site was (is?) mostly used by DJs for uploading sets, and commenting on certain high points of the set is a cool feature.<p>But the biggest problem with their site right now is performance. A SoundCloud tab keeps the CPU consistenty busy. (And, interestingly, only when it is visible. When it's in the background, it's fine. Using Firefox.) And prolonged playing causes my browser to crash. I use both Spotify and SoundCloud, and Spotify has none of these issues. I presume the Flash player component is to blame.<p>Oh, and of course: "A new version of SoundCloud is available. _Reload_ your page..." And then you reload, and nothing changed. Every other day, sometimes more than once in one day...<p>But it's still a really great site, I love it.
Nice points in the article<p>However, using the album art as blurred background even for the non-playing song feels cluttery and overkill. I'd keep those backgrounds simple to highlight the current song even more. Less is more :)<p>There's also some lines that seem superflous and can easily be removed, the sidebar divider being the most obvious
Wow, this is excellent. Very reminiscent of milq.com. Go to <a href="http://milq.com/bead/best-nba-plays-of-all-time" rel="nofollow">http://milq.com/bead/best-nba-plays-of-all-time</a> for example and play a track to see the persistent player on the right.
This would be a nice improvement, although my biggest problem with the website is that I can't pause the music with my media buttons on the keyboard.<p>I actually wrote a SoundCloud client for OS X a couple of years ago but before it was really stable they fucked up the API so badly that I wasn't able to play most of the songs anymore: <a href="https://github.com/soundcloud/soundcloud-javascript/issues/12" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/soundcloud/soundcloud-javascript/issues/1...</a><p>Here is a screenshot <a href="http://jabs.nu/tonality/media/tonality.png" rel="nofollow">http://jabs.nu/tonality/media/tonality.png</a>
I don't use soundcloud too much but a related service that could also go through a major redesign is spotify.<p>Some of the things that bother me most:
1 - I use 3 platforms (Linux, android tablet and android phone), and that's 3 different UIs and features.
2 - really small buttons, lots of wasted empty space in every platform
3 - songs / albums / artists. If you save a song, the album and artist are saved too even if you don't care for those. There's an option to see full albums only on the Linux preview, but not on any of the android applications.<p>I really enjoy the service, but the UX can really get on my nerves sometimes.
While redesigns are always interesting or refreshing, I think one has to be careful dubbing these concepts as "solutions". From a UX standpoint, "I’m usually searching for an artist or song name" is a dangerous standpoint as you're not the user. From a PM standpoint, I assume soundcloud (located next door to us) will validate any new feature. So often we see the prettiest solution doesn't become the most effective one. Personally, I find SC very intuitive to use and while I agree with some of the proposed changes some seem counter-intuitive as a long-time soundcloud user.
Their onboarding is also pretty bad. The friction in switching from another music player is so high - you can't import music so you have to build a library from scratch. I'm a user but this stopped me from moving entirely from iTunes.<p>This post also doesn't go into their mobile apps, which (I think) are easier to use than the competition. This is the best post you'll read on their mobile apps: <a href="http://blog.brianlovin.com/design-details-soundcloud-for-ios/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.brianlovin.com/design-details-soundcloud-for-ios...</a>
While many aspects of this redesign are well thought-out, I think that the changes to the stream are not of high quality. With the new design, white space in the stream is greatly diminished and it feels cluttered. One solution to this might be to only have the colored backgrounds for the track that is playing.<p>I think it would be best to try to keep more of Soundcloud's orange on white look for continuity too.
Good ideas. Would the single song view look like solution #2? The latest SC redesign put the song info in the upper right corner, and thereby hides stuff like track lists for DJ sets behind a modal pop-up. It's very annoying to keep switching between the song (with player controls) and the track list if you are looking up the name of a song.
> "The avatars on the waveform are virtually meaningless. They’re too small to visually identify anyone who’s commented. Their only value is to let a user know there are comments on the track..."<p>Wrong. The comments appear at exact the right time which enhances the experience of the song. Have you seen twitch chat? Its gold.
Really great work by Evan. The problems with SC UI he outlines are real, the solutions are mostly of high quality. Hopefully someone @ SC will notice, but given how hard it is to work with graphic/UI designers, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd come up with something completely different, just for the sake of in-housism.
biggest problem is that each player would cause considerable cpu and memory hog. I noticed that my soundcloud tabs in one window were causing lot of CPU and memory usage in Chrome.<p>My other gripe is better filtering of subscription. Sometimes when someone spams like 30 tracks from their album it fills up the whole feed that I am forced to unsubscribe.<p>Lastly, it's tough to discover new music based on a more narrow filter. Its hit or miss.