Comment by rmatteson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmatteson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

thanks for the comment -

i'm the ui/ux designer on the project, so if a cardinal sin has been committed, it's mine to pay for. snikolic makes all the magic happen on the backend.

normally i would totally agree with you - but the whole point of this site is to listen to music - and it's been paramount to us throughout the project to engage our users right off the bat. it's pretty easy to change tracks or stop playback if you don't like what you're listening to - but part of the fun is hearing things you may not have before. we haven't received a whole lot of negative feedback from our current users about this aspect of the design, but if that starts to change, we're totally open to revising the way things work.

By negative feedback do you mean people emailing you, or any automated metrics you're using? Are you guys doing some sort of A/B testing on this?

I find it terribly annoying when I open multiple tabs and one of them starts playing anything and I have to find which one is the culprit. And when this happens I usually leave the site immediately. IMO it would work better without the autoplay by default, allowing it to be turned on using a very visible play button at the right side of the list or something like that.

By the way, nice project, I love the idea. I once used a site called muxtape[1], and all I hope is that you guys don't have the same fate they had.

[1] http://muxtape.com/story

So far most of our feedback is users emailing us - which has its limitations, but we've got a pretty active and vocal base right now. I'd love to do A/B testing in the future, but we're limited by resources right now. It's been more important to roll out new features than do intense refinement.

I can definitely empathize with the annoyance of having to play musical tabs.. I'm going to be giving this aspect some serious thought in the coming weeks.

Great link to the muxtape story - thank you for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com