
Apple Music Is a Usability Nightmare - cezarywojcik
http://cezarywojcik.com/2015/06/30/apple-music-usability-nightmare
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shadowfiend
The criticisms here are 100% fair… But it's worth remembering that Spotify's
fundamental unit is the user playlist. It's what the social experience is
built around, it's what the user's experience is built around, it's what the
consumption experience is built around.

Apple Music, on the other hand, has a pretty strong bent towards curation and
suggestion. It's clearly oriented to encourage you to use the curated
playlists that Apple Music's folks are creating, and other suggestions based
on your tastes. It's also pretty good IMO at providing suggestions based on
the music you're currently looking at so you can keep investigating.

I get the feeling the playlist functionality in iTunes 12.2 and the latest iOS
is mostly the exact same as it was in previous versions—I don't think it's
been integrated into Apple Music at all (yet?). Right now it's just a way of
organizing things that are part of your music, rather than a way of organizing
things that are part of Apple Music.

So, while it's perfectly fair to be frustrated with the playlist creation
experience, I think it's also worth appreciating the fact that Apple stayed
true to what they've been saying and marketing around Apple Music. Those user
experiences are, at least for me, very straightforward and have generally been
quite good. So maybe generalizing and saying “Apple Music is a Usability
Nightmare” is overstating a tad… Even though saying “Apple Music's Playlist
Story is a Usability Nightmare” maybe isn't.

~~~
mbell
> But it's worth remembering that Spotify's fundamental unit is the user
> playlist

I don't think that is true.

My interaction with Spotify is much more about listening to an artist or song
and using 'more like this'. And the fundamental unit of sharing is 'friend x
listened to this song'. If I know I like their tastes I tend to list to that
song then, if I like it, listen to 'more like this'.

I spent about an hour earlier trying to use Apple Music via iTunes and left
incredibly frustrated. I couldn't make it do anything I actually wanted it to
do.

As a simple example, go to 'new' then, pick a genre from the incredibly
awkwardly placed drop down, scroll down and you see 'top songs'. Cool, I
thought, lets play the top songs from this genre! Except, as near as I can
tell, there is actually no way to play those songs as a 'playlist'. You can
click one at a time, and they play, but after each finishes it just stops.

~~~
threeseed
Weird for me it seems exactly right. I tend to share and follow playlists not
individual songs.

Also I have had no issue getting Apple Music to work the way I want including
what you were trying to achieve. I just clicked on Top Songs and it opened as
a playlist where after the first song finished it played the next one. Maybe
you were clicking the indvidiual songs ?

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archagon
Played around with Apple Music a bit this morning. It has promise, but despite
the hyperbolic title (wish people would stop that!!) I agree that it's a
little bit of a mess. I think the problem comes with smooshing the iTunes
Music Store and the Music app together. Suddenly, the interface I'm used to is
relegated to just a single tab to the right of four others that I only have a
passing interest in. Also, some of my favorite artists that I routinely listen
to on Spotify have gaps in their catalogues (Tipper).

Say what you will about Spotify, but their native iOS app is really top-notch.
I keep finding little details that make my user experience so much more
delightful. For example, I recently learned that you could swipe left and
right on the "now playing" bar on the bottom to move between songs. It feels
really organic and I wish other players would adopt it. I also just found out
that you can swipe right on songs to queue them up for playback, and now I use
it all the time. Dunno WTF happened with their desktop client, though.

Oh, and now that I've learned that you can (secretly) search Spotify by genre
('genre:"progressive metal"') and see the top tracks, my life (and music
discovery) have been much improved. I also routinely bulk-add the top tracks
from artists I'm investigating to get a feel for their music. Don't see a way
to do either in Apple Music.

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iLoch
I used Apple Music a lot today - I didn't really find anything majorly off-
putting about the UI. There were a few quirks which I'll let Apple off the
hook for, seeing as they haven't dramatically changed their Music app in 9
years (unless you're counting the flattening that came with iOS 7.)

To say Apple Music is a "usability nightmare" is a HUGE stretch IMO. If I
opened the app and was presented with 1000 different options along with every
single interface guideline being ignored, sure, maybe _that_ would be a
"nightmare".

I think what you mean to say is "Apple Music isn't close enough to perfect
yet, from a usability standpoint."

~~~
obstinate
Agreed. A nightmare would be if it were difficult for the typical person to
figure out how to get it to work. For that, things like gdb or git would be
fine examples.

"Apple Music's playlists have some bugs and usability issues" new title sadly
less sensational.

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coned88
Frankly I hate that spotify is so built around playlists. I have never made a
playlist in my entire life and don't plan to. It's a great tool for making a
list of songs for a party or maybe a road trip. Maybe a parent wants to get a
kids favorite songs for a car ride to school. Things like that are of great
use.

But overall why do we need a playlist to add songs to a library. I have so
many gigs of music on my desktop. When I pay for a music subscription I want
to replicate that.

Trying to do that in spotify is a disaster. Not only does the interface both
web and fat client become slow and cluttered but you don't get a hierarchical
view.

I went back to just following artists on spotify. Then when I want to listen
to an album I just go through the semi hierarchy. I tend to listen to full
albums not songs.

The fact that you can't save an entire artist on spotify says everything.

I really like Google Play music but google doesn't give it the care spotify
does. Google takes the stance that their algorithms can solve every problem
and spotify knows humans need to be there to fix some issues. One common issue
I saw on Google Play Music was albums belonging to artists of the same or very
similar names being listed on each other pages. The worst part is google gives
users no way to alert them.

I truly hope apple shakes things up.

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justinzollars
Spotify isn't much better. I think its designed so that I crash my car while
navigating through a complex maze of menus with something that should only
take a single click. (For example just try to "Star" a song. Its like 6
clicks)

~~~
paul9290
At least with Apple Music you can tell Siri to play X song while driving. With
Spotify indeed you had to navigate through a maze of menus and there are many
of us doing or were doing this while driving.

Siri's success rate when asking her to play X song or artist is pretty solid.

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__david__
I thought he was exaggerating about iTunes, but I went to try to use the menus
and they are horrific. They don't act like desktop menus at all. And you can't
select and then drag and drop the songs, like you can in the normal iTunes
screens. It's gratuitously different in every way.

The only small consolation is that I don't use playlists, so it doesn't really
affect me. But, ooof—it's quite the bad UI.

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hellbanTHIS
Rdio is the only one of these things doing it right and they seem to be doing
it by accident.

The trick is to follow people you _don 't_ know on Rdio, find a weird album
you like, see who listened to it and if they have good taste in music follow
them. Then see who they're following, etc etc. Forget about playlists just
focus on albums. Try not to follow people you know personally and be ruthless
in unfollowing people because it only takes one Drake fan to pollute your
Trending page.

But yes Apple Music is horrible. It's the first time I've gotten the sense
that Apple really doesn't know what they're doing and that's a scary thought.

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pasta_2
It's truly bizarro world if you think the Spotify UI is good.

~~~
circa
Exactly my thoughts and pretty much the only reason I use Rdio instead.

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numair
"Apple Music sucks for creating playlists" doesn't mean "Apple Music is a
usability nightmare."

The entire industry is aware of the fact that user-generated playlists don't
actually work to achieve mega-scale consumption. If they did, Spotify would be
at 200m global subscribers and we would all pay for enhanced playlist
features. People don't actually know what they want to listen to, and they
don't want to spend time on curation -- not even on time curating their
curators.

Spotify was built on the false premise that people wanted a "social jukebox"
and that this "social stickiness" would somehow create an experience that,
when combined with licenses to every track possible, would create an
experience superior to pirated channels. Look, they'd say -- you can now see
what your friends are listening to, and enjoy unparalleled social discovery!
Better still, you can simply subscribe to their playlists and ride off their
cool vibes!

The vast majority of people just don't care about this stuff, and definitely
not enough to pay for it. They want to press play and skip stuff. And that's
about it. The Pandora UI is the UI to beat. Everyone in the business knows
this -- hence why you see everyone pushing radio metaphors over playlists.

If you're judging Apple Music on the basis of its playlist UI, you're an edge-
case user judging edge-case features. Time to reflect on the fact that you
aren't the target audience.

~~~
autoconfig
Sources for these claims on what the vast majority of people want?

Either way this is a terrible excuse. It implies that you necessarily have to
sacrifice good list support in order to promote discovery and other features.
They are not mutually exclusive. As a consumer I don't think it's too much to
expect a good playlist UI in a major product like this, especially coming from
a company that prides itself in delivering good user interaction.

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bhauer
I don't use or care about Apple Music. But had to upvote for Opeth in the
screenshots.

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paul9290
Apple, please fix the horrid UI/UX for creating a playlist. It's not easy to
figure out and heck I just want to tell Siri add this to X playlist. That
would be the easiest and quickest way to create a playlist. As of now creating
a playlist is so confusing and frustrating!!!

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acomjean
Kind of a shame. I use itunes mac daily and I feel they've really did a great
job with the UI. It has a little learning curve. I have a lot of songs and
making/ adding to my current playlist is pretty easy and powerful.

music for ios is another story...

Hopefully this 1.0 and they'll improve.

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JohnyLy
I don't think the problem is the usability, the problem is that they don't
propose anything new. I remember Steve Jobs saying something like we should
not copy others but we have to do things different. With Apple Music, they
just try to copy existing services. For example, iMap was a failure but at
least they tried to propose something different from the competition. Not with
Apple Music.

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DrJokepu
Meh, this is a bit overly dramatic. I've played around with the interface
briefly and really didn't find it that bad.

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baddox
I don't think I'll ever be interested in radio or "music discovery" services,
but I'm already a huge fan of the Apple Music app update, because it finally
adds the "play next" and "up next" feature that has been conspicuously absent
for so long.

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joe_internet
I hate to be the person who nitpicks, but

> I turned on the Beats1 station to see if it was any good, heard some rap
> "music", and then very very quickly turned that station off.

It's OK not to personally like specific genres, but please don't go as far as
to dismiss those you don't like as not being "music".

~~~
GauntletWizard
No, it is perfectly acceptable to use hyperbole. Anyone who says differently
should be shot. If you like rap music, you are stupid, and your parents are
stupid.

Criticizing music in a post about music preferences is not unreasonable.
Thicken your skin.

~~~
throwaway3453
Did you want a reply, or the catharsis of getting downvoted from "stupid"
users who like rap?

~~~
GauntletWizard
I want an argument about how often I am seeing people being offended by having
their preferences criticized. I can take somebody disagreeing with me (except
on this issue, of course :) ), and civil society relies on criticism, and
people accepting criticism. Berating people because they are dismissive of
things they don't like is a path that lies madness. Feedback should not be
purely positive, truncating the negative, because then effects that are
polarizing or simply have costly disadvantages outcompete effects that do are
more mildly positive, but without (or fewer) drawbacks.

~~~
obstinate
Saying that rap is not music may be criticism. But it is certainly ignorant
and unconstructive criticism. It is criticism in the same sense that "your
mom" jokes are.

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ninjakeyboard
I was sort of hoping to read a usability analysis of the site from someone
more experienced than me.

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MichaelCrawford
Mac OS X at first had a music folder icon in the finder window sidebar, also
all macs came with optical drives.

That icon was removed several years ago. You can enable it but its not there
by default. Most macs dont have optical drives anymore.

My mac and my ipad are constantly griping that they cannot reach the itunes
store. thats because i often have no internet connection. im more productive
that way, see.

Enriching the corporation is not what music is for. I can earn some goodmoney
as a coder but to be honest I find playing piano for tips to be a far mor
satisfying experience.

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grumblestumble
beta software is beta?

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gorkemyurt
Its fine, software development is not easy. I am sure they are going to fix
the rough edges sooner than you think.

(also beats1 is great)

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chasingtheflow
"So I tried Apple Music for half a day and dismissed it out of hand"
paraphrasing. Cool bro, glad you gave it chance. Glad you're making headlines.

------
gress
This is basically clickbait designed to capitalize on the new service.

With zero observation of what people want and how they experience it, he
conducts a dry and pedantic assassination of the UI.

I've talked to 4 regular users today all of whom were having an enjoyable
experience and expressing no concern about the UI - instead the conversation
was all about what it was allowing people to discover and listen to.

The only person who had any discomfort with the service was a friend who
hasn't used streaming before and was concerned about the ephemeral nature of
what he listened to - I.e. Unlike with buying musing it's easy to listen to a
lot of stuff and not make a connection with it to a particular place and time.

In any case unless you like pedantry, don't read this article - instead listen
to some music.

~~~
autoconfig
Your comment would be more useful if you actually addressed the "pedantic"
things. Have you even read the post?

\- Can't delete multiple items or move multiple items to another list

\- "three dots" AND right click shows different contextual menus

\- 4 clicks to delete items from the "My music" menu.

While I don't think the article is especially balanced, these items are far
from pedantic.

~~~
gress
They are pedantic if they don't affect usability significantly, and to
determine that one needs to know whether users are impacted - not whether they
conform to a principle.

