In Apple's keynotes, they often claim that they "love music". But their app misses some basics that people who actually love music might like to have: To be able to sort music by year (and have year of release not be year of reissue), exclude various greatest hits reissues if you want to 'discover' an artist's works, and not default to shuffle when you haven't used the app for a while, because I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd like to listen to an album in the order that the artist put the songs in.
It would also be great if syncing your own music to a device actually worked without issues (such as not copying the entire album, which you inevitably discover later, on the road). I stopped listening to music on the way to work because of all the roadblocks the app put in the way.
It's utterly beyond me how the largest tech company in the world can't sort basics of their their UI out, over periods of years.
Why...WHY is it that people design stuff like this?
> Why are the fonts so large that you can't see list of songs properly?
> Why do I have to click so many times to be able to view all songs in an album?
> Within a couple of clicks, I should be able to view a list of songs in my playlist and I can sort it the way I want. By year, by genre, by any parameter of the song
> Same thing for albums list and artists list
Unbelievable - the new UI paradigm with BOLD fonts and large negative space is eating into the limited valuable real estate on a mobile device.
What goes into these people's minds? Can someone shed some light?
>What goes into these people's minds? Can someone shed some light?
Maybe I can shed _some_ light.
I worked for one of the big music streaming services for a while.
>limited valuable real estate on a mobile device.
Maximizing data density on a screen is absolutely not a goal on any 'large audience' app.
Yes, an app with tons of data crammed on a screen would make some folks happy in the HN/geeky communities (I am not sure that's true actually, but that's something that I often see power users asking for).
That's not who these apps are targeting though.
The design of these apps is often a mix between opinionated choices (basically what is trendy right now in the design circles) and what works in user testing.
Turns out, most of our users are ABSOLUTELY lost when they have to interact with a mobile app.
Music streaming services have way too many features :
albums
playlists
radios
some kind of AI powered automatically created track lists (all services give this a different name, but they all have pretty much the same feature)
lyrics,
podcasts
On top of that, there is a ton of data for every single track :
title
album
artist
composer !!!! (classical music treatment is usually awful in any streaming app) .
has lyrics ?
is downloaded on your device ?
The player adds another layer of complexity :
current track
queue
random mode
repeat mode
Here is the dirty little secret of the music streaming industry : how to present all this in a way that allows random users (not geeks) to efficiently interact with the app : nobody knows how to do that :/ .
There is just way too many information to cram on a screen.
To pile on that, usual development cycles are focused on releasing new features, either to keep up with the competition or because that's how PMs demonstrate that they are 'improving' the app.
It is orthogonal to actually improving the user experience and we can see cycles of several years where the UI becomes more and more bloated with random stuff until designers are able to push a redesign with half of the features.
And soon we start cramming features again until the end of this new cycle.
I think there is a balance between something that looks like Apple Music and an excel spreadsheet full of information.
Apple Music is way out of the normal density expected from a quality app. Apple has a phenomenal understanding of UI and they're one of the best - just look at the UI of the settings menu on your iPhone. Everything is cleanly laid out - just the right amount of information density. Apple Music seems like it was designed by someone like Will-I-Am (sorry :-) ) with absolutely zero understanding of basic functional UI principles.
If I were to design UI, I'd design it like how aviation does cockpits. Functional, not "trendy". Everything has a reason - if you can't explain "WHY", you shouldn't be designing UI. Personal taste, subjective opinions, "I kinda like it that way" doesn't work in aviation industry. Please don't take it as I mean Apple to follow the same principles, I am just mentioning the other end of the spectrum in UI design to provide contrast.
> If I were to design UI, I'd design it like how aviation does cockpits.
You seem to not understand the difference between designing UI for professional use where a user has to spend countless hours learning where each button is compared to an app for general population where users have to figure things out on their own.
Try to put an average joe into a jet cockpit, he would not understand a single thing, and he should NOT. You have to emphasize the most used features and elements with bigger font or negative white space in order for people to better understand where they should start and then walk their way into deeper understanding. In a fighter jet cockpit most of the buttons have identical look and it’s impossible to get started without reading a manual.
You indeed make very good points. I was hesitant to making the cockpit analogy but I did say that this NOT how Apple should design their UI. I was merely pointing out the other end of the spectrum in UI design space.
Everything you’re saying is absolutely true. UI design for masses is different than for a fighter pilot. I think Apple Music app is one of the worst even considering for the masses. Just look at their competitor - Spotify and learn from how they’ve designed for the masses. Apple Music arguably fails at meeting the basic UI expectations from a company, ironically, that values design immensely.
I’m not a designer but I’ve thought a lot about this just cuz I find it interesting from a data organization POV and I like music. I think Apple deserves some credit in terms of this. Music.app is no iTunes but ask Siri who plays the drums and her answer is great. It’s bad at the difference between Studio Album and album of 1 song/remixes etc. if you have an idea how you’d like it laid out I would be interested to see.
>Everything has a reason - if you can't explain "WHY", you shouldn't be designing UI .
oh UI design in such an app always has a why
Before doing any modification on the UI of such an app, a lot of attention is given to user data.
It can't be completely objective because at the end of the day any interpretation of user data is at least a bit subjective (and generally way more than that). It does aim at being data driven though.
At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion for going off on a tangent... since you mentioned the iPhone settings menu:
Why is it that in some places there is a setting with a off/on toggle on the right, and in other places there is a setting that takes you to a sub-page with only a off/on toggle? For a current example, the Handoff menu under General.
While I agree they generally do a better than average job with UI, I've never really understood why the settings app has this inconsistency. It's been this way for many versions.
Rant over. Though not really a rant anyway, it doesn't make me mad, just puzzled.
Probably because those pages with just a single toggle requires more explanation about what the toggle does, and thus the explanation doesn't really fit with other settings.
Also, just like how it's easier to add a modal than integrate more state into the underlying view, it's easier to add a new view controller to your xcode storyboard for an interaction.
For example, as you note, you have space to describe it and add possibly more UI to the feature. And in a future pass, you can decide to fold it back in to the existing UI and solidify it there. But that pass isn't necessarily worth it.
my theory is that more stuff was planned and/or is on the way, or... some features might be availablr only in certain areas or hardware combos. some menus you see might have multiple options for some other variants; for your device, it's just the one.
Where do you think Spotify's mobile app falls in this landscape? I would argue it is a great balance between new user needs (the Home and Discover areas), with most power user needs in the playlist/search/playback portions.
It isn't perfect, but it actually feels like an app designed to be used to play back music. Apple Music feels like a big, clunky, advertisement.
There is usually some degree of uniformity in streaming apps :
- all the services tend to get the same deals from the majors. Let's say service x gets terms A, service y will push to have the same A.
- they all solve the same problem .
Personally, I am not a big fan of spotify's UI :
- I despise Blur, it is the autotune of design and Spotify uses it a lot.
- As much as I like an app that is easier on my eyes without all these white areas everywhere, spotify is way too dark for my taste .
- it is surprisingly unpolished for such a big mobile team. To be fair a lot of the complexity is self imposed and comes from the fact that the UI is rendered based on the configuration sent by the server (display 3 columns of artists, etc)
Spotify does shine on the playback tech though. ogg vorbis, loudness equalization, etc they are on top of their game here.
> Here is the dirty little secret of the music streaming industry : how to present all this in a way that allows random users (not geeks) to efficiently interact with the app : nobody knows how to do that :/
I said it before and I'll say it again: Rdio knew. In my opinion the best streaming service for music enthusiasts and casual listeners alike.
I concur. One big pain point is how small the buttons are to change songs. I'm usually driving when listening to Apple music and would love it if I had huge buttons or could go vertical for driving model which made it dead simple. Nope, let's make it hard so my eyes go off the road.
This and it also seems like Apple has given up on a lot of their playlists. Adding one song per week doesn't count as updated playlist. For how many billions they generate, you'd think you could just have an army of people making amazing playlists.
Wouldn’t getting back to the lock screen (slide from the top) solve your issue ?
That’s super fast and you can almost blindly hit the buttons.
For most audio app it’s a better control scheme than the in-app smallish buttons you struggle with.
I actually disagree that Apple should make it easier for you to physically use your phone whilst driving. If you need to change songs use Siri or better yet pull over.
And I also disagree that saying that Apple has given up on their "playlists" or that they are stagnant in content. There are many playlists within Apple Music: the auto generated ones e.g. Chill Mix which are refreshed once a week, the Beats1/Guest ones which are refreshed very often e.g. a few times a day and the ones littered through Browse which again are often updated once a week.
> I actually disagree that Apple should make it easier for you to physically use your phone whilst driving.
My college banned smoking on campus halfway through my studies. They removed every ashtray from campus. This lead to people littering cigarette butts everywhere.
There's actually still ash tray in airplane toilets for that reason. I think it's legally required for airplanes flying through the US to have ashtray in toilets although it's illegal to smoke in these same airplanes ^^
> Arguing with a robot over spelling seems like it would be more distracting than hitting a button.
The discussion preceding this comment is about navigational buttons, not selecting songs from a playlist. Siri will not argue with you when you simply request the “next song”.
> And I also disagree that saying that Apple has given up on their "playlists"
They don't update any of their playlists that often. For instance, their "new music" playlist gets updated once every week. TripleJ, the local ad-free radio station in Australia, updates their new-music playlist every day. There's so much (western) music being released throughout the world that I find it unfathomable that it takes Apple a week to filter out 25 songs.
I was with Google Music and they would have a new playlist (new music or otherwise) catered to my taste every morning.
Having the New Music playlist change every day sounds like a terrible idea. Personally I am not going through 25 new singles every day so I like having the time to appreciate what has been chosen.
If you want completely new music then look at the Radio section. They have full, hand-picked playlists which update at minimum 3x a day.
I'm genuinely surprised at all the disdain for it here. Coming at least from Spotify's scattershot mobile UI, Apple Music is straightforward, consistent, and, critically, performant (Spotify is the slowest-loading, non-game app on my phone).
Certainly there are gaps, particularly when it comes to sorting. But all this about bold fonts and button sizes seems to stem more from an expectation that a music app should be a dense, text-focused experience like iOS's email app than from any fundamental design issue. Given Apple Music's focus on album art as the primary identifier for recordings, the UI has an appropriate information density - one can argue that's the wrong priority, but if you accept that premise, the UI supports it well.
I'm of the mind that all the good UI concepts for touch screen smartphones have been done. Combine this with change for changes sake and it's easy for me to believe we've passed Peak UI and are on the down the other side of the bell curve.
I think we should demand a 12 month moratorium on UI changes across all operating system user interfaces and focus on stability and speed.
I am honestly confused what you are talking about.
Looking at Apple Music right now I see no bold fonts except for say Library and Artists which only appear on those main screens. The negative space you talk about is largely a result of them making the thumbnails large (on list view) and because otherwise the screen would be cluttered (on now playing view).
Personally I think it's clean and pretty well designed and a lot better than the alternatives.
1. Is it really necessary to say “Apple Music” on top!? We know it’s Apple Music. Also "Get all the music you want" tag line is unnecessary.
2. Huge amounts of wasted space above “Browse”.
3. Space on the right of “Browse”
4. If the category/genes string length is small, why take up the entire bottom half of the screen?
5. Row spacing is excessively large
I understand that white space has a tremendous value in design especially when you have screen real estate and valid reasons. On a phone, I want maximal density of information so I don’t have to go into a hierarchy try while I need to quickly do something. Flatter UI hierarchy is preferred over deeper obfuscation of branches.
There is so much I could say. In fact, I might write a blog post explaining why Apple Music’s UI is one of the worst of any App I have ever used. I will explain and provide mock ups of the design.
1. It says Apple Music since you haven't paid for a subscription.
2. Mostly because of 1. But the rest is because when you scroll that white space changes to show the title.
3. This is to be consistent with the other sections.
4. This is a standard list view used across all of iOS. What exactly are you expecting Apple to do here ?
5. This might be to do with your phone or font size. The white spacing isn't that large on iPhone X.
By all means write a blog but my suggestion would be to buy the app first just so you have the proper experience. And then appreciate that Apple designs their phones for a very broad audience i.e. think grandparents. Maximal density of information is not something most people want.
Thank you so much. This is one of the most insightful articles I’ve ever read on Japanese design! I frequently visit Japan and absolutely admire their sense of aesthetics.
In return :-), I would like to offer the most crazy, cutting edge, next gen movement in design today: Resurgence of Brutalism
http://www.brutalistwebsites.com
> Ultimately the most important device is the
> management of the white space in the layouts.
> It is the white space that makes the layout sing.
> Bad layouts have no space left for breathing - every
> little space covered by a cacophony of type-sizes,
> images, and screaming titles.
This may or may not apply to the Apple Music UI, but stuffing up any space with stuff will not make a design better for sure.
May be I didn’t convey the message right. I’ve already mentioned the value of negative space. I understand what negative space is and why it can be judiciously used to benefit layout composition.
Apple Music uses way too much to the point where it is frustrating to use it.
I am not saying we should make Apps that look like excel spreadsheets. I kind of find it condescending when people provide advise without understanding the argument.
Why Apple who has driven UX throughout the industry gives two craps about UX in Apple MUsic is baffling.
There’s so many times I want to do something like play all songs under recently added or even one song without having to go to another screen. Also you ask Siri hey play songs similar to this one and she will but why the hell does Apple Music create a playlist I have to clear before going to play something else outside of that stupid playlist I didnt ask it to create? I just said play songs similar to this. So may terrible UX examples.
I only subscribe still because Of Apple Music and Siri integration for when driving.
Also music discovery is crap.. I just want it to randomly play new songs similar to a playlist I’m listening to and do so randomly/surprise me. Nope doesn’t do that and this I now subscribe to YouTube red for discovery and it rocks as I listen at work and home on my computers. Not safe to use Red while driving :-(
> It's utterly beyond me how the largest tech company in the world can't sort basics of their their UI out, over periods of years.
The same way the App Store on Apple TV still doesn't have an "Updates" tab with updates available for the apps one has installed. The only way to do this is to go to each app's page and see if there are updates available. It has been this way since the fourth generation of Apple TV with the App Store was released about two and a half years ago!
I've been repeating this a few times — Apple and its leadership ought to be deeply ashamed about such things, but never seems to be and doesn't show that it cares either. What ever happened to user experience being a distinguishing factor on Apple products???
I haven't used Apple music, but I feel Spotify also falls down in the UI. There seem to be plenty of pitfalls where the best of both worlds could be provided, yet aren't.
Basics like, why only show the top 5 popular songs from an artist? with no option to "view all songs based on popularity"
If I can't recall a song name from an artist, I then need to start going through individual albums to find it... Or if I've over played the top 5 songs, and just quickly want to throw something from say, the top 20. No dice.
Alternatively, if I go into "my library" and select an artist, I now see ONLY those songs I've saved. With no option to view the rest of what they have to offer. Likewise for an album (only songs I've saved on that album).
And WHY can't I scroll backwards through the songs I've most recently played WITHOUT changing the current song? Seriously? Has a spotify staff member never been in a situation where their friend has asked, "hey what was that song two songs ago?"
These seems like pretty basic UI navigation options that should be easy to access.
Funny that you mention "sort music by year". In Spotify, if I start a radio-station of e.g. a Sade song, it comes up with music from the same era (80s music mostly), but that's not what I want; I want music in the same style!
Yeah I'd agree on that. I mean though if you are trawling an artists catalogue. In that case I think it's reasonable to want to listen to a discography in the order that they were released, once you've decided that you want to get to know an artist properly.
I find the Music app unbearable. It feels like a webview app, or ported from Android; definitely not optimized for the iPhone. It feels like it was designed by committee, like something that came from Microsoft or Nokia 10 years ago.
Sometimes I feel like there must be something wrong with how I think about music, because I like a lot of what Apple comes up with, but the Music app I cannot stand. Surely it cannot be that bad, and I should just adjust? Then I actually use the Music app for a bit, and I'm again convinced that I'm not crazy.
The app is confusing and hard to navigate, but somehow still manages to miss so many features I'd look for in a music app—I don't even want to start listing everything I don't like.
I, for one, will certainly not be getting an Apple Music subscription until they come up with a music app that actually makes sense. It is making me listen to less music. And I love music.
Definitely agree with regards to showing albums by year and filtering for just studio/live/whatever. On the other hand, I find it quite easy to play albums straight through.
Yeah that is easy, it works. I should have been more specific.
On the iPhone, local albums, If I stop the music and perhaps don't get to start again for a couple of days (like on a weekend, coming back on Monday), when I hit play again, it doesn't start where I left off. It does starts on shuffle.
Interestingly, I've noticed the shuffle produces exactly the same result every time too.
Playing an album straight though steps on desktop ui:
1. Type album name is search bar
2. Select "search _album name_ in albums"
3. Hover mouse of album art
4. Press play button.
if you look at Spotify, you find they have all these features that music lovers would use, even though they may not be the majority class of users. This feels to me like Apple is marketing themselves as what Spotify is (the leading competitor in this space), but their product development falls short of their marketing.
> it sounds like you only enjoy it, not love it :P
God, how arrogant. It's one thing to be opinionated about music, it's another to judge another's enjoyment. Talk about making music something miserable to share with others.
Personally, the spotify client is a piece of shit for me--buggy, slow, and it can't sync any music not in its library. Somehow spotify's marketing manages to leave that out, and Apple Music is a much better option for me. Clearly you don't really love music if you're limited to Spotify's catalogue. ;)
Well of course you wouldn't consider it, it was your arrogance that started this thread. Why would you see a flaw with your own worldview? That would be uncomfortable!
Who are you to define the love of music? No better than Apple.
Y'know, I'm quite comfortable with being told about flaws in my worldview. You just haven't not provided any so far. - But clearly you have something to say about it, I'd like to hear it.
Here's a starter: I don't think taste is subjective and those that do believe it is just haven't developed any (yet). There is no shame in that, the shame should be not wanting to extend yourself.
I'm not saying everybody has to have the same taste, clearly everyone can enjoy different things. But there is a clear difference between having taste (of some sort) and not having any. Ask any designer, visual artist, musician, or apparently, Linus Torvalds.
This is btw not meant to disparage the great-grandfather comment about enjoying music at all, it's started this discussion, but is not related to it.
The thing that baffles me is that now if you're listening to a playlist and you tap the album/song it takes you back to the playlist its playing in, not the album itself. it takes like 3 more taps just to get to the actual album
It's actually possible to search for labels on Spotify. Just type: label:[LABEL] (with spaces you have to use quotation marks, i.e. label:"Smalltown Supersound"). A shame that it's not implementet better... when they obviously have the data for it.
People also often claim they "love music." Turns out many of them just want to turn a fob and have the top hits continuously fed into them without effort on their part.
iTunes and Apple Music is garbage. I'm tempted to write my own music player with big buttons that I can press while driving, without all the bullshit. It's incredible how dumb they are about this.
It would also be great if syncing your own music to a device actually worked without issues (such as not copying the entire album, which you inevitably discover later, on the road). I stopped listening to music on the way to work because of all the roadblocks the app put in the way.
It's utterly beyond me how the largest tech company in the world can't sort basics of their their UI out, over periods of years.