Design vs Art Blog

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.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Many users like to see what others are reading, buying or watching. Specially news sites know that having the possibility to check the most popular articles is very important for users, so they provide special popularity-based organization of news. A good example is the New York Times, they placed a link to the most popular section in a prominent position.

The New York Times organizes and presents the most popular articles in a neat way. They also add a small description below each title (e.g. “Articles most frequently linked to by bloggers on the Web”). What it’s important but missing at nyt.com is the time range, it might be not very clear for many users that this page is presenting the most populars for this day.

Digg, knows better the importance of the time range settings:

This time the BBC News site messed up, giving users to many choices and making a simple feature something complicated to understand. Here, the BBC shows a traffic monitor that tells users how busy the site is. Does anyone care? Also, the mos popular list moves all the time, it gets automatically updated on every minute. Is that necessary?

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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.

Popularity: 5% [?]