Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

A bit offtopic but I am a Google Play Music subscriber. I switched to them over Spotify because they had a much better UI and UX. I use these music services at the radio mode mostly and I am pretty sure Spotify's designers primary concern was how to make users' experience miserable.

Unfortunately Google seems to follow the trend nowadays. Take for example the Play Music Radio Page. There is a list with photos and titles of my favorite songs. For every song there are 4 links, one on the thumbnail, one on the play button inside the thumbnail, one on the title of the song and one under the thumbnail that opens a menu with additional options. The thing is that none of these links and options plays the song displayed. Clicking on the song's title, plays an entirely different song!

Even worse and I think this may indicates the absence of serious dogfooding, is that I can't anymore select text on the page. Same did spotify. So I can't play the song and I can't copy-paste its title in the search bar. Instead I either have to type the title manually or go and search my library.

UI/UX is subjective. My recent thoughts on the new UX from google is that it's bloody awful.

When I just want to listen to some random music I just play my thumbs up playlist. But every time I open Google play, you have to click to open the hamburger menu because menus are no longer trendy on desktop sites. Want to have a list of what's playing be your homepage? Impossible in the new google play, you can only view the playlist in a popup.

Also, it's terrible for music discovery and totally (if unintentionally) chauvinistic. Their algo is bloody awful, it seems to use one song as the basis for "I'm feeling lucky" and never mixes up genres. Also, related artists to females? Other females! I like quite a few female artists, but if you click "I'm feeling lucky" there's a 20% chance google music will only play me female artists. And it will spiral into genres I don't even like and have no songs thumbed up, purely because they're female too. It will never play related artists from a different sex. I've got a couple of screenies somewhere of a list of 50 odd songs recommended to me, all female artists.

The radio algorithm is good though, much better than spotify's.

For example I listen to a lively rock or pop song and ask “play music” to start a radio station based on that; it will continue with lively songs of the same genre.

On contrary spotify would either continue with rock ballads or slow pop songs. It seemed to me that spotify doesn't understand the context of the song (not sure if this is the right word), instead it reads a generic genre and tries to play something from the billboards. It would continue with ballads even when I started a radio station with a power/death/thrash metal song!

> Their algo is bloody awful, it seems to use one song as the basis for "I'm feeling lucky" and never mixes up genres.

Okay, so is the problem that "I'm feeling lucky" is bad because it "never mixes up genres", or...

> if you click "I'm feeling lucky" there's a 20% chance google music will only play me female artists. And it will spiral into genres I don't even like and have no songs thumbed up, purely because they're female too.

...is the complaint that "I'm feeling lucky" is bad because it does mix in genres you don't like based on the sex of the artist?

Because it can't be both.

This is why such a feature is very hard to get right :-) .

So far all the music tastes detection algorithms I have seen are pretty awful.

The main problem is that "I'm feeling lucky" picks a random song and then plays that song's station.

It isn't a "random station", basically the issue is that it never reseeds from your data.

So it's nothing like a station that's good for music discovery based on your previous choices, it's just discovery based on a previous choice.

I'm sure Google could design better, but it's probably just low priority.

We have a very active dogfood group internally.

It's likely, even with a lot of internal users, that none of us have hit the text selection problem, or haven't reported it (or there's some technical or prioritization reason for it). I'll look into it and report it to the group though!

Honest question, why do I have to click the hamburger menu on the desktop? Why isn't the menu shown by default?

Your recent redesigns consistently suck ass on desktop.

1) They're not my designs, I just dogfood. 2) I don't know :)

Internally, they actually had this responsive at one point, where the menu would be by default open on large screens and hidden with the option to expand it on smaller screens. Also not sure why they changed it.

Please do, thank you very much! This is an issue only on the radio page currently.

With spotify you can't select text anywhere. It was one of the most serious shortcomings for me because when I listen to a song and want to learn more about it, the web-browser way is “select -> right click -> search with google”. :)

After a quick look the only place I couldn't select text was on the radio station cards, after you choose an activity (probably because the whole card is a link).

Are there others?

This is the only one I found so far. The real problem with the radio station cards' page is that although you show me some songs, I have no way to play any of them, either directly (1 click) or indirectly (2-3 clicks).

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