Current status: thank you Pandora

Pandora just seems to be getting better and better. Whilst I love the visual interaction achieved by TheSixtyOne.com; and whilst Rdio.com is generating social-drool by banking on your friends recommending music for you; and Spotify.com continues to kill it in the EU whilst flailing about with no US launch (WiMP.no just launched as a strong competitor too); and whilst Blip.fm, Jango.com and a whole host of others are interesting - I'm continuing to find that something about the feedback loop in Pandora that just works.

I find myself rocking out more, skipping and seeking less, it works on my mobile and my home devices, and as my friend Nick Mehta (http://fitfuldreams.wordpress.com) said recently "it's like a soundtrack to your life".

If Pandora could get a handle on the licensing issues, and combine this level of goodness with my sync'd music content, I think they'd have a strong position in the future of online music and it's delivery. I'd pay for that. Would you?

Sent from my iPhone

*** Update June 21st - see http://wadenick.posterous.com/current-status-ios4-cloud-9 ***

Sheesh, what's with the #failwhale today?

Opened Twitter, and saw this... Actually, I didn't, but thought it was a funny picture. What's interesting is the zero tolerance people are developing: what I did see today was a number of "aaagh! failwhale!!11!!" sort of tweets. Failwhale has been on vacation for many long months - Twitter has been doing incredibly well and grown like mad, I say cut them some slack.

Windows trained the world

Yesterday I mentioned (the first half of that tweet is a joke, btw) that I thought many of the world's users of computers are "trained" by Microsoft Windows. I don't claim this is a good or bad thing, but just note that it's currently, as a generalization goes, true. After all, a huge percentage of computer users have been on Windows for 10 to 15 years now. 

 
This morning I was fortunate enough to be part of the team / the audience for a read-out from Human Experience Lab on A/B testing we've performed on the last 2 major versions of the software that I manage day-to-day, and lo and behold: more than one user (almost half of the test group actually) was confused by the use of carets ( ► and ▼) as the visual icon for expandable tree nodes. Several suggested a variant the following: "if you used Windows-like + and – symbols it would have become obvious straight away". 
 
Interesting. My take on the point here is that we have to remain 100% conscious at all time of the audience we are designing for, and ensure that our designs fit them best. And then test it. Improve. Iterate. It works. 
 

So, as to our carets, what should we do? There's a couple of considerations in play for our answer: 1) I work for a large company with a product roadmap that affects 16,000 companies and 30M users. We can't change things on the fly, so a change would take time. Specifically, the "next major release at the earliest" kind of time. 2) Windows 7 has moved to - yup, you guessed it, caret, or ► and ▼ expanders. By the time we make a change the Windows users will be moving organically.

So whilst we could technically change that back to + and – in about 6 months, we're actually on the front-end of a coming change already. This means we expect this particular test score to change when we run it again this time next year, even though we change nothing (well, that's not true, we'll likely make the carets more obvious).
 
Design for your audience (not you), test, improve, iterate. The first part really means you must know your audience first.  

Nick Wade
Rambling man. Sometimes literally.
 sent from threadsy