Posts Tagged ‘Application’

UI: Songbird vs. Spotify

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

In user interface design it is the overall feel created by many small details that matters. You must pay attention to the small things while not loosing sight of the big things. Tiny bits can overwhelm the overall user experience. Compare and contrast Songbird and Spotify, two music applications.

Spotify:
Spotify

Songbird:

(I tried to get a black/dark theme (Feather) for Songbird but the two I tried were unusable.)

Which do you prefer? Which scans easily and lets you get to the heart of the application? For me, it is Spotify, hands down. It is cleaner and simpler. Smarter choices have been made and attention has been paid to the details without cluttering up the bigger picture.

A simple example is how Songbird defines edges between panels. Spotify has a smooth, unbroken, graded bar from the top of the application down to the list of songs. This includes the window controls and the back/forward buttons and a search box. Songbird on the other hand has a dividing line between the window controls and the back/forward buttons and search box. Between the left-hand playlist panel and the main song listing panel there is one dividing line in Spotify and three in Songbird. Seems like a small detail but this “insert a dividing line” design choice is everywhere in Songbird. Every time it is used it adds clutter to the user interface.

There are many other small details; Spotify uses text-shadowing, Songbird doesn’t. Spotify’s font rendering is superior. Songbird uses tiny, odd custom scrollbars, Spotify sticks with what works. Inputs in Songbird have a deep, dark inner-shadow that makes them far more prominent than they need to be. Spotify favours smart choices over giving you buttons to tweak everything as Songbird does.

The bottom line is Spotify follows Mac OS X design conventions and it makes a difference. Songbird 1.0 is vastly improved over beta versions and does a lot more than Spotify but when I want to play music I would choose a Spotify user interface to a Songbird user interface.

* I am aware that Songbird is cross-platform and incorporates a browser and does 50 million other things. Possibly these are its main problems.

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Songbird goes beta and feels it

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Songbird is your web-browser mashed up with iTunes. The idea is to blur the barrier between music on the web and music on your desktop. If you have ever visited a music website and gone through downloading music files and importing them into iTunes then you’ll know it isn’t as seamless as it could be. Finding music on the web can be a chore too, often in many different formats and presentations. Songbird should make this a better experience.

I’ve been following Songbird for awhile now hoping that it would evolve to meet its promise. In public beta form now it is pretty set in stone and I can no longer continue hoping it will improve. My two main criticisms are that it is slow and that it is cluttered. The new beta skin is meant to be cleaner but side by side with other Mac OS X applications there are too many lines, buttons, trees, expanders, tabs and UI widgets. It looks and works like a blend of Windows and Mac OS X which is not a good thing. The UI needs to be cleaner and simpler. Focus on the music, forget all the clever little bits and bobs that add “just one more button.”

Added to the cluttered UI is a laggy UI. Click a playlist and it takes those few milliseconds longer than you think it should. This is the fine art of UI latency and the generic nature of Songbird’s architecture is putting a lead weight on that speed-of-click. Will the final release be faster? I hope so but it isn’t just about raw speed. UI speed is also about using transitions and magic tricks that make the application feel fast. The iPhone UI is measurably slow but it feels fast. Clever transitions.

Another complaint is the implementation of the browser mashup idea. Some items in the tree change the main viewing area while others unexpectedly launch a new tab in Songbird. The left-hand navigation disappears and you might as well be using Firefox at that point. By using tabs the websites feel disconnected from your music list. I want to see a music website on the right and my music on the left. A simple drag from right to left to download music would work then.

This is the direction Songbird is going though and it is at the maker’s discretion. I assume it works for them. Songbird won’t be replacing iTunes on my desktop and I’ll have to wait for another day to find the right blend of web and desktop music playing.

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