Show HN: The Artist Hunt – An intuitive way to discover music
theartisthunt.com
theartisthunt.com
So I dismissed the instructions without reading them thoroughly. Everything was super confusing and it was unclear what up or down did, other than start playing different music.
It seems weird that up chooses a new artist and down chooses the next song. I heard a song I like, accidentally pressed down, and then up went, in an attempt to get back, but instead was sent to another artist. Super confusing.
The back button randomly changes artists. This is also super confusing. Couldn't you have a button for that?
When I click on one of the albums, the transition doesn't make it clear that it's now playing what you clicked on, and the previous list is now GONE. I assumed clicking would "select" the album. Also, once I've clicked an album, there's no way to get back.
And finally, my general feeling about the interface is that it's too focused on "power users", not being quick and easy to understand. I doubt this is something that needs really easy hotkeys, and if it does, it should be complimented with buttons that do the same things.
Don't let this feedback discourage you. I think you're solving a real problem, it's just hard to get past the UX. My advice would to to do some user testing. When you're building a super experimental UI, that isn't like anything else in existence, you probably want to verify that it doesn't completely confuse people.
tl;dr Do some user testing and you'll see most of these problems for yourself.
Some of the things you mention are actually relics from when this was a game, that limited how you can browse. (The initial idea was a game where you browsed as fast (ie few clicks) as possible from one artist to the other, but the feedback we got indicated that the discovery part was much more interesting)
But then again, we definitely get lost in our own (power user) perspective. We were dead set on using arrow keys as main browsing technique to start with, to get that mechanical and low friction feel. Not great for most users though, probably.
I think the fact that you don't ask the user to put in an artist from the very beginning is what contributed to my confusion. I didn't know how to switch to a different genre/era of music so I thought I had to navigate there somehow. It took me a little while to finally see the "enter an artist" text. Once I put in an artist (I used Nirvana) it started to make sense to me a bit.
edit: played around with it some more and now that I get the hang of it and know that I can easily change my starting artist, it's really cool!
2. So I gather the arrow keys help you find related artists. What do I do if I don't like an artist?
3. It says I can jump to an artist by searching in the text field. Where the hell is that?
4. The back button thing, previously mentioned.
It's good to keep directions simple, but you've gone to far. From reading the directions, I can't figure out what this does, why it's useful, or even how to use it (where is this text field?)
Same problem for me in firefox (latest version): no text field, means I'm stuck with a certain style on initial launch.
One feature I wish it had, were a way to go back down to the previous set of artist choices. Other than that, I've been enjoying exploring music with this.
Where are you getting the data from?
We are using the Spotify Web API for everything: music (nicely cut 30s previews of songs), artist relations, images.