Last.fm Re-design: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
My favorite online music service Last.fm is currently ungoing a semi-public re-design, available to Last.fm subscribers ($3 per month) at beta.last.fm. Bearing in mind that last.fm is now owned by mega media company CBS, it is great to see last.fm continuing to evolve fast. In this post we review the new design and see if it's ready for primetime. The short answer is no. The beta feedback so far has been mixed and comparisons to Facebook have been common.
A reminder that last.fm is an online music service, which can be enjoyed via a desktop software app or within the browser. Last.fm is built on top of a very impressive music recommendation database called AudioScrobbler. See our February '08 post about last.fm for full details on how last.fm works.
What's New?
The re-design project was announced on the last.fm blog on 21 May. Its stated mission was "to make online music easier, better and more discoverable." The most noticeable change so far is a new-look UI (more on that below), but here some of the other new features:
- Fully visible library - your entire Last.fm music profile is made visible, "down to every last artist and track."
- Real-time charts - every track you scrobble gets added to all of your charts, instantly.
- Activity feeds
- An improved music player
- Improved sharing
- Podcasts
New look
Mixed Feedback; Visual Design Too Much Like Facebook
Last.fm has been gathering feedback on the re-design in its Last.fm Beta Group and on Get Satisfaction. And according to a recent blog post, they've even done some real world usability tests in London. There's also a Flickr stream if you're not a subscriber and curious to see what the beta looks like. Finally, this MetaFilter discussion has some good feedback.
Initial feedback from last.fm's core user base has been mixed. It's fairly common to receive negative feedback on any new design (boy do I know about that, based on RWW's last re-design!). Here are some of the negative comments about the new design in the Beta Group: "generic and commercial", "the aesthetic is lacking", "boring and old fashioned", "resemble[s] facebook too much", "desperate attempt to create a web2.0-ish design".
More specifically, users seem to be are worried that "the music on the new layout is an after thought, relegated below the profile and library" (ref: LadyParadis). The activity stream reminds some users of Facebook, which at least one thinks is unnecessary - "I personally don't see the need in knowing that The Beatles have recently been tagged 'psychedelic awesomeness'", complained Besame.
My Feedback
The new design is nowhere near as polished as the current design, and it does indeed seem very square and blocky like Facebook. Take a look at the comparison:
Current (old) design
Beta (new) design
Aesthetically, the old design is much more pleasing. It must be said though that the old design was always flawed in terms of navigation -- I remember when I first used last.fm, it was difficult to figure out where to click to actually play music. There always seemed to be just too many features and no easy way to navigate to many of them. Take a look at how many levels of navigation there are - and different ways of expressing links - and you'll see what I mean. The new design tries to remedy that confusion, with a traditional vertical navigation panel. But there are still areas where the nav makes no sense - e.g. 'Events' and 'Charts' are both listed twice, once in the header bar and again in the vertical nav. Yet 'Video' and 'Community', two other header nav items, are not in the vertical nav.
Beyond the design aspects, the beta site still needs to address several key features. Chief among them is finding friends, in order to discover more music. I've tried to find new friends on beta last.fm, to no avail. I clicked furiously around the site, but found no way to a) find friends, and b) add them to my network! The new design seems intent on tapping into some of Facebook's mojo (as well as its design), yet social networking on last.fm remains a painful, if not impossible, experience. This is/was also a problem in the old design. However, this feature is under development in the beta according to some of the holder pages I came across.
But to the positive aspects. The newly expanded Library feature is colorful and promising. It seems to be lacking some detail right now, but this is a beta. The Charts page is great and has a lot of interesting data. You can tell that I've been on a Neil Young bender recently for example:
Conclusion
Overall, there are promising new features in Last.fm Beta. The increased amount of data that is exposed on the new design is the most important - and welcome - new feature. The Activity Feed, which one user above complained about, seems innocuous at worst and vaguely useful at best. Overall it's better to have more data to play with than less, in an online music service at least.
However what will really make the most difference is an enhanced ability to discover new music, which means being able to get better recommendations and befriend people with similar music tastes to you. So far, the beta last.fm provides little in these crucial respects. We're told it's coming, but when? Until these recommendation and social features arrive, I'll stick with the old last.fm.
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I personally haven't last.fm very useful for discovering new music in quite a long time. The future of music discovery are aggregators such as http://cowbell.fm and http://hypem.com.
Yes, this is a bit of a shameless self-promotion :)
Informative post!
I think the design is actually very Wordpress admin 2.5! I understand the need to streamline the navigation a bit. It can be a bit chaotic, but then that's also half the fun. It's a bit of a magical mystery tour at the moment. I admit I thought the original design is more powerful stylistically, but I imagine this new version passes a load more usability guidelines.
I'm sure it will still remain completely awesome.
It does indeed look a lot like Facebook, but I like the way Facebook looks. last.fm's new look draws the eye to everything on the page even more, in my opinion. Thank you for the informative post!
I know it's not your fault, nor is it something last.fm have much control over, but....
I am sick and tired of antiquated product / music licencing that means I am not allowed acess to music services available to US locations things like last.fm's subscription plan. It's not as if some of the service providers have no clout (I'm looking at you itunes, amazon MP3, etc).
and, no, TOR doesn't let me get round it...
I use the old as primary and the new when I need to edit something
I really like comment #3 ... i was ready to plow into the fact that the "current" design stomps the bejeezuz out of the "new" design but Robert really put things into perspective for me... he's probably right (with the obvious exception being the wordpress 2.5 part...).
Why is the whole world hell bent on making every site look the same? Of course it needs to be easy to use, but is there only ONE way to implement that?
martin (#5), I was able to buy a subscription and I'm in NZ. I can't use Pandora tho, which really annoys me.
last.fm should focus on improving page load times before they "fix" their UI. or am i the only one who thinks their site is slower than molasses on a cold day?
@kayvaan yeah the ui is fine (for the most part) but they are painfully slow.
Ironnically I have been pseudo mimicking the last.fm design while they are going to mimic, facebook's moderately less crappy than myspace, design.
thanks you
@kayvaan: You're certainly not the only one facing sluggish load times every now and then.
Perhaps a little bit off the UI-topic in the article, but one thing that last.fm also does very, very well is the "openness" in relation to retrieve data in a number of different ways.
Besides the data feeds (XML,RSS etc.) and the ready-to-use widgets, the Audioscrobbler Web Services API is really great.
I'm using the API to retrieve artist thumbnails and display related performers within my own music collection.
The ability to scrobble tracks I've been listening to from my own collection is great. After scrobbling it will show up on the recently-played list and update last.fm's listening statistics.
(@Spencer: perhaps something to consider..?)
//Michael.
They can´t charge you to access the re-design!. Bad idea.
What I don't understand is:
Why does everyone want to imitate Facebook's design? it's not that frickin' great, alright guys?
See also: LinkedIn
It looks like Facebook, but the Facebook is userfriendly, easy to navigate on the site.
Cool post, Last.fm is also my favorite online music service, they rock... and I like this redesign. Maybe the information architecture changes are facebookian (which honestly is not a bad movement itself), aesthetically is just like many ruby on rails based web apps that we are seen everywhere (Easy tigers ;-) I am not saying that Last.fm is based in Ruby, I am just saying that Ruby apps tends to have a front end design schemma which is similar to this new redesign). Beside that I do not agree with this sentence: "Aesthetically, the old design is much more pleasing". It is a matter of taste... I think exactly the opposite.
Does the beta allow you to bulk tag tracks? Using the website to tag one track at a time is really cumbersome.