A Digression: The redesign of thesixtyone.com and Listening to Your Users

This post isn't about food.  It's about my favorite music site and what happens when a business doesn't get feedback from their users before they do a massive redesign.

Last year a did a brief stint at AOL.  I worked mainly on their music site, AOL music.  While I was working there, I looked at a lot of other sites in the online music playing, collecting, and discovering spheres.  A lot of my focus was figuring out the best way to do two things:  create playlists of songs, and how to have a good seamless playback experience.  Both are somehow harder than you would think, but there were lots of good and bad examples out there of both. 

Two of the sites I discovered became regular music sites for me after I left AOL (well, 3 if you include the sadly departed original muxtape.com): first, blip.fm.  This site is great for when you have a song in your head, you don't have it handy on you iPod, you can go to blip.co and do a simple search then play it online.  It's also really easy to listen to what other users are listening to, but isn't really that great for discovering new, unheard music.  The second site is thesixtyone.com.  The site features new music, uploaded by the actual artists.  I'm writing the rest of this paragraph in past tense... The playback experience was great - there was a small, unobtrusive but functional player that featured uninterrupted continuous music playback.  By this I mean that if you were on a page listening to a song, and you navigated to another page on the site, the song would continue playing.  I know this sounds simple, but very few sites actually support this. 

I discovered a lot of great new music by small bands from all over the world on t61.  I recommended it to all of my friends.  When I had time at work that I wasn't in meetings, I listened to it for hours at a time.  There was a whole game/reputation element to it that I didn't really understand entirely, but I was still able to easily participate in.  I could indicate that I liked a song by giving it a 'heart.'  I could save songs to my profile so I could listen to them again later.  I was at level 14 - again not sure exactly what this meant, but 14!  When I got bored of listening to my own saved songs, I could listen to other people's 'radio.'  I could 'favorite' people, they could 'favorite' me and musicians that I liked could comment on my profile and thank me for 'hearting' their music.   It wasn't totally perfect, but it seemed to have a lot of promise.  I was really looking forward to the iPhone app so that I could take it with me.

So imagine my dismay when I went to the site yesterday and saw that they had done a total and complete redesign of the site.  Gone was the list of songs on the home page.  Gone was the simple music player.  Gone was the genre list of songs.  And gone was any sense that anybody else was actually using the site to listen to music.   I do think that the new design has it's merits.  It looks REALLY nice.  I brings a really nice focus to the artists on the site - in a way that may be really beneficial to them.  It could be a really nice way to listen to music if you start with a list, then launch the 'visual' version of the player.  But I have two major issues with this redesign:

1.  They removed significant functionality for no apparent reason:

They removed or disabled functionality that was primary to what I felt (and from their previous tag lines and branding indicated) was the primary experience model of the site:  a community where you could discover new music.  By removing this functionality, or in some cases just making it really hard to find, they made the site difficult to use and ruined one of the best music experiences on the web.  In just one day of use, I've discovered specific removed/hidden functionality that have resulted in several usability issues:

Music Discovery:

• The home page is now just an image of one band, and the song starts playing on page load.  It's not immediately clear how you navigate to the next song, there isn't actually any clue given that there IS a next song, and there isn't any way to tell what the next song is.  By removing the list on the home page, they've made it really hard for new users to understand what the site is, and really hard for existing users to browse through songs to find stuff to play.
• Maybe it's a bug, but the same song has been the first one on the home page for the past two days.  This NEVER used to happen on the old version of the site.
• They removed the genre pages.  I used genre pages fairly frequently.  I'd go to the "alt country" or "house" or other genre pages just to find new stuff.  Artists must also be pissed that these are gone because unless music gets promoted to the 'home page' it will be really hard to find music that no one else is listening to.
• As far as I can tell, you can't purchase music from the site anymore.  I didn't buy tons of music from there, but I did buy some.  From what I remember, purchasing music directly from the artists was a big business differentiator for them.  It seems to have gone away entirely.  Were artists made aware of this change?

Music Playback:

• I mentioned before that I really liked the music player they had before.  It was small, hung out up in the upper left corner (at least the most recent incarnation did, there was one at the bottom on the previous design).  From the player I could do these things:  pause, replay, heart, save, change volume, see the songs I've listened to and move to the next song in the list.  Now the 'player' has been separated into two different parts:  one on the left is a flyout layer that shows the band name, the song, lets you heart, comment and share.  To pause, change volume, save, return to playlist (??) or replay, you have to go to the upper right of the screen.  Both actions require a mouseover, and both are annoying.  My most common behavior when listening to a song was to heart it and then save it.  Now I have to go to two different places on the screen to do this.  And now when I save it, I have to specify a playlist - an extra action that I'm not really interested in doing.
• Constant playback doesn't work the same way anymore because they have removed the song list pages.  If you can find the way to get to different 'lists' of music, the song you were listening to stops and a new one starts playing.  You don't have any idea what it will be, and there isn't an easy way to get back to the song you were just listening to.
• Search functionality has been removed entirely.

Community & My Profile

• The sense that there were other people on the site actively listening to the site is totally gone.  I didn't come to the site because I knew other people were there listening, but it was great to discover music through other users.  Radio, followers, listeners. All seem to be gone.
• There was a concept of being able to bid hearts to promote songs to the home page if you were willing to spend the hearts to do it.  I can't tell if that still exists or not.   This is another thing that I rarely did, but I really appreciated when others did it.  It made the home page seem more dynamic and fresh.
• The new user profile on the site is just ugly.  There are CD covers in the middle of the page (I think they show actual covers if you have bought albums from the site - but since I haven't bought full CDs they are just blank covers sitting in the middle of the page). 
• My song lists are relegated to a small module in the bottom right of the page.  I used my saved song list a lot.  Now I have to scroll through a little module to find songs I'm looking for.
• People who follow me and people I follow are gone.  There's a button to follow myself, but I get an error message when I try, and why would I want to anyway?
• My radio is gone as well as the ability to shuffle my saved songs
• They've added the concept of 'playlists' which may be useful for some people, but I think it's a mistake to make them such a priority.  Some people make playlists, others don't.
• There's a really clear "etiquette" link that explains how to be nice on the site, but there's no-one left to be nice to.

2.  They are ignoring their users

They seemed to have done this total redesign without talking to ANY of their actual users.  It's possible that they did talk to some of their users, but when I read all of the backlash against the re-design on their Facebook fan page, and when one of the most active listeners that I know of, writes this on his profile: "I don't have an ipod and the[new]sixtyone is worthless - what were they thinking?" it definitely seems like they didn't.  I've worked at start-ups before, and I know that it's easy to claim that you don't have time/money/resources to have multiple versions of a site available and working for A/B or user/usability testing.  But these aren't small changes.  This is a massive redesign and redirection for the whole site and it deserved to be vetted by some actual users.  I've heard developers claim that they don't have to do usability testing or talk to actual users because they ARE the users (ahem, 37signals...) but it's just not true or right.  And it doesn't have to be a difficult, expensive or time consuming process, especially when there is an ardent and active user base such as with t61. 

But the most damning evidence is that NOWHERE on the site is there a way to give feedback.  Not even a bug reporting link which is highly unusual for a newly launched site.  And with all of the grumblings and rumblings I've read online, I haven't read any response or word from the site developers since they posted a note on their Facebook Fan page saying that saved songs were back.  Not a word.  Where are you guys, and why have you done this to us?

My suspicions are that there is a big business or technical reason they did this.  I'd love to know what it is.

There is a lot of chatter and feedback about the new redesign, most of it negative.  Here's a few good links with other thoughts.

http://www.iusedtolikethesixtyone.com/ - site calling for the boycott of the new t61 with several good links
http://www.movementsixtyone.com/ - collection of links about the new redesign
http://t61place.freeforums.org/ - original forums on how to use t61
http://trinitylast.com/a-letter-to-thesixtyone/ - An open letter from an artist
http://www.thedevilsfeet.net/archive/the-rise-and-fall-of-t61-com/ - with some good links to other articles about the redesign
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/as9ql/when_you_do_a_site_redesign_please_dont_do_this/ - great list of the basic usability issues of the new redesign

Comments

[Timj]

Kim, these are really great comments. I enjoy how well-thought out your analysis of the site redesign is.

I'm not sure listening to 'the Users' is always the best bet. After all, was it 'the Users' or Jonathan Ives of Apple that came up with the beautiful UI and UX or the past number of years? However, the Users are speaking and don't like what they see!

I really like that you went through and went bullet point by bullet point to critique the site. Wish there was more of this around!

Tim

[Kim (Edible/Usable)]

Thanks for the comment Tim. Glad to see someone is reading this! But I beg to differ with you on the Apple point. They have a well developed UCD process:

Here's just one thing I found - Mac Dev Center: Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Introduction to Apple Human Interface Guidelines http://bit.ly/97zpF0

A lot of this is basic usability 101 and UCD but they do have a specific section on "involving users in the design process" http://bit.ly/aoct06.

[Shawn D]

Kim,

Thanks for this amazing post. Your details are well outlined, and your professional opinion seems relatively clear.

Regarding the above conversation about listening to users, I think there's a give and take that likely occurs. From a business standpoint, you have to pay some attention to what your users are saying. More companies are turning to Twitter to do just that. But sometimes there are difficult decisions to be made that the users never hear about. They may not know the "why" of something, but those decisions do exist.

Thanks again for the great post.

Warm regards,

Shawn

[Paul]

Hallo Kim,
Thank you so much for this detailed and professionally considered review of the destruction of t61.
My one dispute would be that you begin by saying this is "what happens when a business doesn't get feedback from their users", while I would argue that they have been receiving feedback from users for a long time and consistently choosing to ignore all. This is the culmination of that.
I too am curious what these "big business or technical reason(s)" for their choices are, but rather than waiting for anymore, am joining the rapidly growing community at http://www.Uvumi.com
Thanks again

[Laird]

Kim,
Good comments, but they fail to go far enough in a number of ways, in my opinion.

First, the sheer arrogance of Sam and James in their unannounced rollout, their deliberate disdain for the offended users, and in their complete about-face in regards to their stated mission of 'helping musicians find their audience' is a classic example of how to wreck a thriving operation. Not only have they refused to answer massive and sustained outcry about the loss of community functionality, but they dismembered the active and growing community unilaterally.

Community was, frankly, the single most important aspect of the Old SixtyOne. You cannot even directly comment to the artists any longer - you must send your comments to them via their individual songs - which means interrupting what you *were* listening to.

Next, and independant of the human-factors nightmare of the redesign, the rollout was buggy as hell. Beta testing for function? Apparently not. Oh, they *claim* to have done beta testing, and apparantly some twenty or so sycophants claim to have helped, but if they actually *did* any testing, why was the rollout so pestiferous..? Almost nothing worked correctly on launch.

Bad show, guys!

[Amy Quinn]

Kim,

Great thoughtful analysis of why it is important to listen to users when you significantly change the user experience of your product. I was not a user of The Sixty One and probably won't be now. Too bad since it seems like they had a nifty website before the redesign.

I appreciate your critique of 37signals. As a UX professional, I have always been skeptical of their "we are our users so we know what to design" approach.

Amy

[Lauren]

Hi Kim,

I really enjoyed (perhaps not the correct word - more cringed) reading your thoughts on the changes at The Sixty One.

I am a developer by trade, but with a strong UX focus (although I'm not a professional). As a developer I can see how easy it is to make UX mistakes, developers are about solving problems, but not always about looking at the wider picture.

However while technical difficulties could be reason case for any one of the changes you outlined above, it seems very unlikely that it is the reason for all. That to me sounds like a business decision - not a technical one.

And that, to me at least ;), is way worse - when a bad technical decision is made it can be changed back. With a bad business decision it is much harder to change the minds of those in charge.

Lauren

[Kim (Edible/Usable)]

Thanks to everyone for the great and thoughtful comments. Shawn, Paul and Laird - I coudn't agree more with your points. I'm definitely not advocating that we (or I) as professionals abdicate our responsibility to DESIGN and BUILD usable and enjoyable products by only listening to user input, no matter what it is. When I'm working on designing sites and applications there are 4 general inputs that I use:
1. Business input - what is the business trying to accomplish and how can design support this? I lived through the .com bust where we all learned that not having a valid business plan is short-sighted. But there are still plenty of start-ups around that seem to have an arrogant opinion that if they build it people will come and they can disregard and ignore their customers, i.e., users. t61 is being totally arrogant and unprofessional.
2. User input - who are your core users and what are you going to design and build to support them? This input is the main point of my post here. Especially with sites/products that have an established user base, you can ALWAYS learn something from the people who use your site. If you've never participated in a usability test, it's really amazing how much you can learn from watching people use something you've designed. Some of it can be really subtle, and some of it can be really obvious things that you've totally overlooked.
3. Technical input - this is actually becoming less of an issue than it ever used to be. It's pretty amazing what can be done with software these days, but performance, stability and again, a different way of thinking about how a site looks and is structured are all important technical inputs. For me it's all about learning different things and finding different ways of thinking about complex problems.
4. My own professional experience. It could be based something that I've done before (right or wrong), something I've seen someone else do, a gut feel or a new exploration.

I do think that t61 had done a huge disservice to it's users (customers) and I know we'd all love to hear from them.

[state shirt]

thanks for the great post.

i'd actually be willing to give them a bit of leeway on the radical design changes had they not been so arrogant about it. thousands of complaints and suggestions on facebook and twitter. and they respond by blocking comments. it's pathetic.

i'm leaving my music up there for now mainly as a way to track how many listeners packed up and left. they may not have lost so many had they just treated their customers like real people instead of some google analytics stat.

i guess one good thing about T61 going down the tubes is that i found your awesome blog. i'm hungry now!

[Kate]

Kim. I really appreciate your post. I am a user of t61 and I feel bereft--the new design is visually stunning. But my whole community seems to have disappeared. And that was what I loved about it. I would have coped better with the new design if it had either been designed better (I shouldn't have to stumble around trying to figure out how to do stuff), and/or they should have provided help and support. There is still a search feature, BTW--it's under "Explore" top right. I am also bewildered as to why they'd want to alienate so many people. It's insane.

[mo]

http://old.thesixtyone.com

[Sum]

Really appreciated this post as an artist that's been on T61 since the beginning. I miss the interaction I was able to have with the people who supported my music. It's very impersonal now...

Thanks for the thoughts and insights!

Sumkid
twitter.com/iamsumkid

[Ali S.]

Finally, someone who has articulated and written (quite well, mind you) of the exact problems I was facing on T61 with the new design! I am on the verge of just dropping the site like a bad habit and moving on to last.fm!

I had so much fun on the old T61 being able to communicate with my favourite artists (like Sintellect) or being able to follow a person who shared the same interests in music as myself. Worst of all is the GUI...it's just terrible as it basically destroys whatever semblance of organization or ease of use that it had before!

*sigh* So, it's curtains for the site...as is seen by the way they treat people who voice their concerns and dislikes about the new design.

[Rachel]

so far as i know, at the begining of 2010, thesixtyone implemented a new design with emphasis on high resolution photography, location, and lyrics. but this rebranding sparked controversy among some users, you can easily see their displeasure on the Facebook website's page. some of the most active users prior to the redesign also have quited using the site. so..bad choice actually, or wrong people chosen to manage this change.

[Aliph]

The wow factor and looks are qkluciy over-shadowed by terrible navigation and usability. I'll take listening to, properly organizing, and finding music I might like any day over what utter travesty has been thus far wrought.