Somesongs (what can be done?)

[roymond]

dang internets.

Ha! I was only half joking, actually. It didn't seem like you knew what was wrong, yet you thought it needed something to change. I agree that there are enhancements that could make it more useful (like that analysis shit somebody did for songfight that also made it easy to access lyrics, reviews, etc.). But change for its own sake is bogus. And too many web sites are needlessly burdened by dumbass scripts and cookies that let me "personalize" my experience. Way to go, MySpace. Sure, I'll add a few more Facebook apps because I really need to know which Andy Griffith character I am.

Somesongs was built with a certain amount of blood. I'd rather someone bleed making it easy, keeping it clean and serving the music. Not changing the background color according to my mood.

OOPS, I FORGOT TO YELL!!!!

[JonPorobil]

It looks great, Lunkhead, and I can now give songs that fifth vote.

I have no concrete suggestions, but may I wax philosophical a bit?

I noticed there's one feature in there already (the ability to play a song from the homepage), and a few features being talked about (standalone flash player, "more from this artist" button which would automatically load another song) that should streamline the process of browsing. You can, in theory, listen to a lot of songs without a whole lot of clicking around.

I can see the motivation behind these suggestions, but when it gets easier to listen to (and even rate!) a song without visiting a song page, that necessarily means it's easier to click around without leaving comments (or should I call it "writing reviews?"). The comments are, I think, what made (makes?) Somesongs a community worth coming back to. You can offer - and receive - criticism: detailed, personalized, sometimes useful, sometimes not-so-useful, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny... The point is that we've got a conversation going on. The easier you make it to click around and listen to music independently of those individual song pages, the easier you make it to listen without commenting.

In other words, the limitations that make the site clunkier to navigate are the same site designs that subtly encourage community. Some might disagree with this view, but it's something to maybe think about as you implement new ideas.

[Spud]

What Jon said.

[ujnhunter]

I would love to make it more like the way thesixtyone.com used to be, maybe. (Their current UI is totally bizarre to me.)

They really did screw the pooch with that one... I don't even bother with that site now that they made that horrendous change. The best part for me about The Sixty One to begin with was the feedback people could leave, and seeing who was listening and what they liked... but that's gone.

Anyhow... whoops... off topic...

[ken]

I see, the new Somesongs should be review/feedback driven. Good idea.

Maybe when you play a song, a comment box could come up before you are allowed to move to a new song?

[Lunkhead]

I'm not sure I like the idea of limiting people too much. Maybe we could encourage people to go to the song page by taking away the ability to rate on the song list pages? And/or by not adding (like I did) the ability to listen to the list of songs? I kind of like the idea of being able to listen to the list of songs, though. Like you could list all songs by MC Frontalot and then just start playing them all. It's kind of cool. Or maybe replace the rating links on the song lists with an icon to pop up a little mini rating/commenting dialog without interrupting the music? That way you could rate and comment, but maybe not see other folks' comments. Or maybe the full song info page should always just appear in a dialog, rather than as its own separate page you have to navigate to? These kind of small-ish UI tweaks are relatively feasible for me to make.

[ken]

Is it too much to have two feature sets, one for rater/reviewers and one for browser/listeners?

[Lunkhead]

Hm... well, there is already "not logged in", where you can't rate/review, and "logged in", where you can rate/review. Are you suggesting a further distinction within the group of people who are logged in, to "logged in but can't rate/review" and "logged in but can rate/review"? I'm not really sure I understand what you mean. I thought people were implying that they wanted to encourage a larger percentage of the user base to rate and review...?

[JonPorobil]

I'm not sure I like the idea of limiting people too much. Maybe we could encourage people to go to the song page by taking away the ability to rate on the song list pages? And/or by not adding (like I did) the ability to listen to the list of songs? I kind of like the idea of being able to listen to the list of songs, though. Like you could list all songs by MC Frontalot and then just start playing them all. It's kind of cool. Or maybe replace the rating links on the song lists with an icon to pop up a little mini rating/commenting dialog without interrupting the music? That way you could rate and comment, but maybe not see other folks' comments. Or maybe the full song info page should always just appear in a dialog, rather than as its own separate page you have to navigate to? These kind of small-ish UI tweaks are relatively feasible for me to make.

Yeah, it's two different philosophies, and I haven't yet thought of a decent way to compromise them; they appear to be mutually exclusive. I can definitely feel where you're coming from, and I'd hate the site if it in any way forced you to leave comments, but at the same time, unless you can figure out a way to get the best of both worlds, you just have to find a balance between ease of navigation and gentle encouragement of community.

$0.02

[Lunkhead]

Motivating people is hard. There would have to be some incentive for people to post their songs, preferably good songs. (Bad songs are a disincentive to everybody.) There would also have to be incentives for people to sign up, rate, and comment. I like the schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. It would be cool to implement some of those sort of features (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.).

[JonPorobil]

I like the schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. It would be cool to implement some of those sort of features (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.).

Ugh, that kind of stuff is exactly why I never liked thesixtyone, even when it was more popular than it is now.

Just one man's opinion...

[jack]

Motivating people is hard. There would have to be some incentive for people to post their songs, preferably good songs. (Bad songs are a disincentive to everybody.) There would also have to be incentives for people to sign up, rate, and comment. I like the schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. It would be cool to implement some of those sort of features (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.).

i think you've hit on the meat of the issue here. the old somesongs (well it's still the same but meaning old when it was used alot) was really an offshoot of Song Fight and for the most part, the somesongs "community" was made up of Song Fight people and a few others. I'm not saying that's all that listened, but for the most part, that's who participated, built the "content" which resulted in the added value of visiting the site more than once.

can somesongs rebuild a community? that's the million dollar question. you can try from scratch and do all kinds of marketing but that seems pointless considering a lack of resources and $. you can try to migrate people from Song Fight, which is what's happening, but that could be slow, redundant, and of limited appeal to people. and like you mention, there's the whole signal to noise ratio of encouraging good songs, discouraging crap, etc.

the question you should be asking is what would make (or currently makes) somesongs unique and unlike other music websites? one is it's "antiquated" UI, which at least 2 people seem to like (me and Roy).

and what value does it offer me? in the past, it offered me feedback while occasionally feeding my ego. but that requires a community. and content. which it lacks now.

by the way, you could insert the word Remixfight for somesongs and it still applies.

[Spud]

I like the schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. It would be cool to implement some of those sort of features (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.).

Ugh, that kind of stuff is exactly why I never liked thesixtyone, even when it was more popular than it is now.

Just one man's opinion...

Are we voting? Make it two.

[Lunkhead]

Would either of you care to elaborate beyond just "I didn't like that"? I'd be curious to hear if there were specific aspects of it that didn't appeal to you, etc.

[Caravan Ray]

I like the schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. It would be cool to implement some of those sort of features (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.).

Ugh, that kind of stuff is exactly why I never liked thesixtyone, even when it was more popular than it is now.

Just one man's opinion...

Are we voting? Make it two.

I'm with Lunkhead.

Two-two.

[JonPorobil]

Would either of you care to elaborate beyond just "I didn't like that"? I'd be curious to hear if there were specific aspects of it that didn't appeal to you, etc.

Those specific aspects that I quoted you pointing out? Those are the aspects that didn't appeal to me.

I visited thesixtyone.com once - back when Glenn first discovered it - and quickly realized that it wasn't for me. My memory of it is somewhat sketchy, and I understand that it's changed quite a bit since then. But the one feature that sticks out in my mind is that you were only allowed to rate a certain number of songs a day. The idea behind this was to encourage you to be frugal with your recommendations (and also to discourage abuse), but I felt like it had the unfortunate side effect of distracting from the music itself.

Somesongs has always been - and I'd like it to continue being - a delivery mechanism for music and a community of like-minded musicians rating and commenting on each other's work. You can add features like that if you want, but it seems to me that you'd be ill-advised to call the result Somesongs.

[AJOwens]

OK, so I googled to get there, and now I'm here with my first impression, which is:

It's even worse than SharePoint!

The problem with SharePoint is that everything is too small, and nothing looks more important than anything else.

If you found a magazine that had no cover, no headlines, no pictures, no whitespace, no colours, just pages and pages crammed to the margins with full-justified 10pt text, would you read it? (That's a rhetorical question.)

I don't know what this site was like before, but right now it needs visual interest. More than that, it needs visual cues.

[roymond]

[quote="AJOwens"I don't know what this site was like before, but right now it needs visual interest. More than that, it needs visual cues.[/quote]
<sarcasm flag>
What visual cues do you need to help you:
- press "PLAY" to play a song?
- click an artist name hyperlink to see more by that artist?
- click a song name hyperlink to see comments about that song?

I suppose navigating the lists and voting might be too advanced for you right now. But once you get used to being on the web you'll catch on. Don't worry, it took my mother in law a couple days, too.

[AJOwens]

I don't know what this site was like before, but right now it needs visual interest. More than that, it needs visual cues.

<sarcasm flag>
What visual cues do you need to help you:
- press "PLAY" to play a song?
- click an artist name hyperlink to see more by that artist?
- click a song name hyperlink to see comments about that song?

I suppose navigating the lists and voting might be too advanced for you right now. But once you get used to being on the web you'll catch on. Don't worry, it took my mother in law a couple days, too.

I'm always grumpy before I have my coffee, too.

First off, just so we're on the same boring page, I assume we're talking about http://www.somesongs.com.

The theme of this thread is "what can be done" -- presumably about the fact that the site is moribund. Well, I'm telling you, and for free at that. If you prefer paid advice, pick up a copy of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think.

[EDIT} Pay particular attention to Chapter 3, "Billboard Design 101."

[roymond]

I'm just trying to get to what you think can help, and more importantly what you feel doesn't work. Your last comment was that the site was "moribund", and I agree with you 100%. But this has nothing to do with its design or purpose. It has to do with bugs and problems of administration. That's what might be addressed by Sam and others, with some enhancements.

A couple years ago it was a thriving, exciting place to post and hear music, discuss and grade it. By clicking on the various "top" lists you could easily fill CDs for a car trip with great entertainment, and meet artists you never knew. In my opinion it served up a full CD's worth of new music that blew away commercial radio every month. For free. That's a successful music site, again in my opinion.

I'm familiar with Steve Krug. If I remember correctly he likes things like clear hierarchies, grouping things intelligently, and keeping the page clear of distraction. I'd give somesongs a very high rating along the Krug grade scale. In visiting his site today it strikes me how similar it is to somesongs, except that it's more busy and harder to navigate. He should read his own books I guess.

The only (free) advice you offered was "it needs visual interest. More than that, it needs visual cues." I responded by pointing out how clear it is and I still wonder what you feel isn't so obvious that it needs "cues".

You did criticize Sharepoint for having too small type, which is a configuration setting in a content management/collaboration platform that has little to do with somesongs, other than the fact that somesongs manages metadata and comments about audio files. How your company chose to setup Sharepoint is an entirely different discussion. And why they would use it in the first place is yet another.

You also give some example about magazine content and what if it were laid bare without titles, pictures, whitespace, etc. Even as a rhetorical question, what does this have to do with the somesongs discussion? Magazines are visual, content rich publications, typically advertising driven. Somesongs is a free place for independent artists to post their wares, with a very clear interface that includes very clear title, artist, comment and ratings data. It loads quickly, makes use of hypertext and works on virtually every browser. Exactly the things that the "About" page claims to be the point of the site.

OK, time for coffee

[AJOwens]

I'm just trying to get to what you think can help. . .

I don't know where to begin. I guess I'll start by cautioning you not to jump to conclusions. If the site has lost its popularity, that might be due to bugs or administrative issues, but all we really know is that not enough people use it. To fix that, we need to attract users.

The first step is to advertise. If Reist hadn't started this thread, I'd never have known about the site. If it's linked from Songfight.org, I've never noticed.

The second step is to make sure that when someone visits for the first time, they don't think, "I've stumbled into someone else's house." The main URL takes you, in effect, directly to some kitchen where strangers appear to be having breakfast. You think, "What am I doing here?" and excuse yourself.

I spoke of visual cues, and you mentioned PLAY buttons and hyperlinks. Those aren't enough. You need a banner that says in effect, "This is a whole site, not just a page drifting in hyperspace." You need clear markers that announce "This is where you can listen to songs!" and "This is where you can find out more about the songs!" and "This is where you can find out more about the artists!" and especially "This is where you can leave your comments!", as well as "This is where you can learn more about the site!"

To extend the metaphor, someone in the kitchen should come over and welcome you.

As for the PLAY buttons, like many other things on the page (including the tabs), they're too crowded. You need to give them some space. Better yet, do away with them. These days if you want to play a song, you click the title -- right? You can add "Learn more" links for the details.

At this point, I'm starting to comment on the functional design, and that's not my intent, so I'll stop and return to the discussion of visual cues.

Better separation of purpose is needed. There's not enough contrast between headings and body, tabs and main page, central area and sidebar. Are you familiar with The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams? It's another classic. "The idea behind contrast is to avoid elements on the page that are merely similar. If the elements (type, color, size, line thickness, shape, space, etc.) are not the same, then make them very different. Contrast is often the most important visual attraction on a page."

As for SharePoint, MS has made SharePoint Designer a free download. That's how bad things are.

[Spud]

Expanding on my support of Jon's argument, these are the things I don't like:

"schemes that sites like thesixtyone.com use where they try to make a game out of participation in the site, to get people to be more active. Specifically (points, quests, achievements and awards, leader boards, etc.)."

When I first visited thesixtyone.com, I could not figure it out at all. I got the feeling that if I stuck around for a while, all would reveal itself, and that this was by design - to suck me in. I tend to avoid that type of thing. I also don't take offers of free services for a month that I have to actively cancel in order to avoid being billed in the future (this is statement about me, for reference, not directly about thesixtyone).

Even if I WAS into the visual chaos and "come on in, you'll figure it out as you go" mentality that typifies video games, I would find it wildly inappropriate as a direction to take somesongs, which has more in common visually with Microsoft Excel than thesixtyone.

Although I personally found it somewhat spare, that never bothered me, and the fact that it was highly functional and well thought out more than justified this spareness.

I don't think somesongs needs flashy graphics as a marketing device. It never did. t just needs people to use it. If it is made useful again, people will do that.