On Android, you have 5 tabs at the bottom: Home, Feed, Search, Library and Upgrade. Having Upgrade in the same place that nearly all other apps have a Profile/Settings tab constantly trips me up. I'm actually a Next Pro subscriber too, so it feels a bit shitty to devote so much of the experience to extracting more money from me.
And... well let's look at some user tasks:
Task 1: Go to the app's settings
Settings is only found on one of these tabs! Which one would you guess?
That's right! It's Library!
Task 2: View your SoundCloud notifications
Notifications is also only found on one of these tabs. Which one? That's right! It's Home.
Task 3: Start casting
Casting, perplexingly, is offered on the Home, Search, and Library tabs, but in different locations.
--
This is exacerbated because each tab remembers your drill down independently, because after you leave a tab on a particular drill down, and you return attempting to access one of the top options, they won't be there any more.
That upper right corner is the second most likely place to have a profile/settings menu, and they technically do have it there, but it's split up bizarrely and completely inconsistent throughout the app :*-(
I constantly have to retrain my brain to deal with these things, and it's really only a challenge in this app.
There are some other smaller things that annoy me, like how the "Showing last 7 days" time range selector in Insights (for artists) opens a full screen picker, but if you use the Back button in the upper left or you use the back gesture, it skips back to the previous page instead of closing the full page selector.
I'm sure there are more but honestly just these are enough to irritate me whenever I use it.
All this said, there are a lot of cool parts of the app-- the scrubbable waveform in the playback drawer is really slick, and though tapping on the large background to pause isn't the most discoverable, it's also very cool that they managed to have zero buttons on this view and for it still to be quite capable. It's also really responsive and not very error prone to open and close the drawer by gesture, even though swipe left/right are track skip gestures as well.
And Soundcloud's "Playback History" is something I wish literally any other audio/video app would add. But I just lost how to access it while I was navigating around. It's in there somewhere.
On Android, you have 5 tabs at the bottom: Home, Feed, Search, Library and Upgrade. Having Upgrade in the same place that nearly all other apps have a Profile/Settings tab constantly trips me up. I'm actually a Next Pro subscriber too, so it feels a bit shitty to devote so much of the experience to extracting more money from me.
And... well let's look at some user tasks:
Task 1: Go to the app's settings
Settings is only found on one of these tabs! Which one would you guess?
That's right! It's Library!
Task 2: View your SoundCloud notifications
Notifications is also only found on one of these tabs. Which one? That's right! It's Home.
Task 3: Start casting
Casting, perplexingly, is offered on the Home, Search, and Library tabs, but in different locations.
--
This is exacerbated because each tab remembers your drill down independently, because after you leave a tab on a particular drill down, and you return attempting to access one of the top options, they won't be there any more.
That upper right corner is the second most likely place to have a profile/settings menu, and they technically do have it there, but it's split up bizarrely and completely inconsistent throughout the app :*-(
I constantly have to retrain my brain to deal with these things, and it's really only a challenge in this app.
There are some other smaller things that annoy me, like how the "Showing last 7 days" time range selector in Insights (for artists) opens a full screen picker, but if you use the Back button in the upper left or you use the back gesture, it skips back to the previous page instead of closing the full page selector.
I'm sure there are more but honestly just these are enough to irritate me whenever I use it.
All this said, there are a lot of cool parts of the app-- the scrubbable waveform in the playback drawer is really slick, and though tapping on the large background to pause isn't the most discoverable, it's also very cool that they managed to have zero buttons on this view and for it still to be quite capable. It's also really responsive and not very error prone to open and close the drawer by gesture, even though swipe left/right are track skip gestures as well.
And Soundcloud's "Playback History" is something I wish literally any other audio/video app would add. But I just lost how to access it while I was navigating around. It's in there somewhere.