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 My.Muse.Net Header: Primary branding and global functions.  Status Bar: Gives account stats and subscription information. |
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Playback Control: User can select media (audio or video), which machine to playback to (shows all agents logged into the same user account), and transcoding (bit rate) options. |
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Search: a user can search her/his collection by Artist, Album, Track, or All. Results are returned to the appropriate column (see below). | |
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 Play Icons can be dragged to a media player to play all tracks by an Artist, all tracks in an Album, or individual Tracks. |
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 Add Icons are single clicks to add all tracks by an Artist, all tracks in an Album, or individual Tracks. |
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 Remove Icons are used in the playlist to remove tracks. |
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 Help Icons provide help and are contextually situated throughout. |
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The main interface Before laying out the Muse.Net client UI, I interviewed a small group of potential users to understand how they organized their digital music collections. Using folders to organize their music and digital video was the most commonly used method; for good reason, it's the only way to organize a collection on a hard drive. The most common patterns, artist name and genre. When asked about their physical CD or vinyl collections, the most common was simply by artist. At this point, we had to make a development decision too. We all agreed that letting the user define their own method of organzition via folders would be best, but would require heavy development and involve possible security risks while traversing a user's hard drive remotely. We also had a metadata engine that could return information about artists, albums, and tracks that we wanted to expose in the UI. Since user-defined organization was too costly in development, and we had the associated metadata available to us, we turned to the basic organization patterns used by a good number of users, music stores, and music sites. That paradigm, a hierarchy by nature, made a good fit with our metadata, and I designed the UI after it. The result was a left to right progression through the hierarchy. Selecting an artist would display all of the artist's albums in the next column, and all of the the artist's tracks in the next. The playlist The playlist is a feature that allows users to create custom playlists and save them as metadata on the Muse.Net server. I simplified it to mimic other interaction schemes that most Windows users are familiar with. Capitalizing on user learning can yield huge usability gains, afterall, why re-invent the wheel? |
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My.Muse.Net for Winamp The Muse.Net client is also available for Winamp2.9 and Winamp3. Using the same premises, the UI schemes follow suit. The primary concern with the Winamp components, since they are built on a different platform, is brand and product consistency. The underlying technology to both the web client and the winamp component are the same. I reinforce the Muse.Net brand through color and typography. I also reinforce the idea of My.Muse.Net as the product that you use to access your music. Keeping with the same interaction scheme, I made slight adjustments to fit the different form factor of the Winamp component window. This helps reduce the amount of learning a user has to do when using either product. Ideally, we want users to be able to use the Winamp component on their machines, and the web-client when using a shared machine. User Response: See what user's are saying about Muse.Net: |
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