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Comments on new design

Firstly I will say that I'm your paid subscriber and that the wealth of information on your website is extremely valuable for me. I couldn't imagine my life without allmusic.com. Now about the new design, I have few comments to make while I still remember how the old site was. Search field I think is unnecessarily long, secondly sorting before was possible with a single click on a header. Now you have to click once on the pull-down menu and then 2nd time on the actual attribute. To me that sounds like double the work. Also before when I saw a list of albums, I could just hover my mouse over its title and the allmusic rating would simply pop up. Now, I have to actually click on the album, let the page load to see the same information. Again, to me that is step in the wrong direction. Nothing of the above is critical, but it would be nice if the new design would bring in improvements and not make its use more difficult.

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Hi Miomir,

Thanks for the feedback.

1. We did make the search box larger because we wanted to display more differentiating information in the Typeahead box (to get people to what they were looking for faster).

2. Based on user experience research and accessibility experts, we opted for dropdowns for sorting for a number of reasons. It provides clarity to the user for what they are doing (as opposed to hoping that people know to click a line of text to sort the results...many people did not know that it was an option!) and also for accessibility. Spelling out the expected results in plain text is helpful for people using screen readers or people with accessibility software.

3. We always called these little hover boxes "Tooltips" and when researching this redesign, we found that the vast majority of other sites have done away with this kind of pop-up on their sites. Some users did like them, but others found them to be a nuisance when just moving their mouse cursor across the page.

In addition, they were a bit of a technical headache to maintain (the widget that we were using to have the info pop in was no longer being supported). Hover-over tooltips also aren't able to be implemented in mobile (where the majority of our traffic is).

We opted to not implement them, and wanted to wait for user feedback to see if anyone was using them. If there is a massive public outcry we may try to see if we can work them back into the site using new code or a new tool. If most users didn't use them or are glad to see them gone then they will likely remain retired.

Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.

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