I got excited when I received an email from Nokia announcing the new Nokia Music Store. OK, I didn’t get excited at all, Nokia has been sending me promises of good service for a long time. Without success.

I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.

The new Music Store

Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.    

My point

This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.

We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?

User experience could be so much improved if you make the login process easy and if your site remember users once they registered. If for security reasons you want your users to login every single time they go to your site, make the login process easy and place it in a prominent location, if possible in the home page. Yahoo!, for example, is doing it very good.

Yahoo! asks users to sign in to get access to all the services they offer and gives the possibility to keep signed in, so users don’t have to go through the process each time. This is great for users but also for Yahoo! as it allows them to show users personalized content as soon as they reach the Yahoo! home page.

It’s sad for me to accept the fact that I have to use emusic, the music download service that I love, as a bad usability example. Service in general is quite good but the login process is horrible, even more, I have read in forums that users have been complaining for some time already.

The specific problem is that users go to the emusic site to, off course, download music, and to do that they are required to log in every single time the user reaches the site. To make the whole thing more complicated, the site is too silly to remember you.

Also, a login box in the home page could make user’s life easier. Come on emusic, let customers to stay logged in, they will like it, this is more common sense than a design pattern.

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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.

I was surprise when I read that the Head of Digital Communication of Mercedes-Benz (actually, Daimler Chrysler AG) was going to be part of the panel of the Building Communities discussion. What does Mercedes has to do with online communities? Well, in fact, a lot. Sven Doerrenbaecher showed the public how Daimler is using online communities to power the Mercedes-Benz brand.

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Very impressive is what they achieved with its Mixed Tape, an online community for music download that has 2.8 million users. Thanks to Mixed Tape, Mercedes, an “old economy” company, has 18% of the German music download market. Music was free, artist were applying to get into the compilations and people were discussing about it. Every compilation cover was showing a different car and the whole design was following the Mercedes brand.

Unfortunately, Mixed Tape is closed now, but Mercedes says they are preparing a new one, to be release in early 2008. The good thing is that they left the forums opened, and they ask the users for recommendations for the new versions. Well done!

Another interesting thing is the Mercedes-Benz.tv, and IPTV service performing different programmes. The over-all design of the Mercedes TV site is very good and attractive.

This was an excellent example of old-into-new-economy. Bravo Mercedes!