Popularity Based Organization of Music Charts: Last.fm
Music charts are another example of popularity-based organization of information and one of the sites with more of that is Last.fm, the online community for music lovers. The concept is very simple, users listen to music on their iPods or online, and last.fm keeps track of the listened songs and artists. Then, they make charts with the most listened and compares users’ taste.
The main charts are “Recently Listened Tracks”, “Top Artists This Week” and “Top Artists Overall”. Information is combined with artists’ pictures, the design in general is very cool:
Although I love this site I have found two usability problems. One is that for some charts some of the information is like hidden, for example, in the chart below is difficult to see the arrows indicating if the artist moved up or down on the ranking.
The second problem, that you can see on the same picture, is that the charts are updated from time to time, once a week or so. In my opinion, most users would expect to see this information updated all the time, or at least to have the option of getting “The last 7 days” or “The last week”. Probably to get the maximum of the charts in your site you have to keep them updated, so the users will come more often.
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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.
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