I ceased subscribing to Last.fm when they were bought out -- I mean, they didn't need my money anymore -- and now I'm glad I did. I think the new site design is tacky and unattractive in comparison to the last style. The layout is cluttered and less immediately user-friendly than the previous layout. The new layout also takes ages to load. And I really don't know how I feel about all these drop-down menus.

ProjectX419 said:
it make my skull go BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Well more like 75% white and 25% grey.

Studogvetmed said:
I would like to propose a list of things that have been brought up to the staff about the beta that were either fully or partially rectified as changes based on user feedback.

1. About Me was in the smack dab middle of the profile page. Long and ugly. It's moved to the right now. Likely still not "adequate" but better than the middle. I don't know if next to our avatars is the answer, it may not be with how image intensive so many users make their about me’s. I once thought a "read more" like in wikis would help this, but giving how image intensive these are how could would one of the OMI images look in that area, huh?

2. The charts on profiles originally were 10 items and always defaulted to 7 days. the library defaulted to overall. today we can customized number and time frame and the default number is 15 not 10

3. The background was more or less white on white for the longest time, It is now grey. The sidebar nav was bare for the longest time and wasn't until July it got a bit of style.

4. Recent visitors were home page only for subscribers. Today it's been moved back to the profile.

5. The hompage had three recent listened tracks at the top of it. Many people saw this as redundant and commented so. It was changed to the listening now and moved out of focus to the sidebar. Of course now ere are dealing with the slightly also redudandt recently added stuff... But hey, small battles

6. Friends lisening now was fairly bare, only showing ACTIVE listeners. Today it shows also people recently listening as in the old live dashboard.

7. The recent track list only showed a picture for the track being currently listened too and only showed the artist pictures. Now, still not optimum, be we get more pictures and also some album artwork where available. We got a half listen.

8. Recent track times went from X hours ago to specific time stamp back to X hours ago. Score.

9. You had to page through one by one in the library sorted by plays. Today there is a drop down menu.

10. People didn't like a lack of recognizable subscriber status in the forums and in avatars. You had to hover to see a black bar to know a person was a subscriber. Today there is a black box, gold, red, etc.

This does not include bugs spotted and squashed.

Now there is still a lot of more feedback to be given and listened to. So if people can keep it constructive and heartfelt I want to remain mildly optimistic we will see improvements. I have a suspicion that most of the layout is here to stay so that is something that we'll have to get use, but there is hope for some things to at least make things easier to swallow things like:

1. Collapsible modules. Especially that crazy player in the upper right corner. I mean if we are going to make it so that it actually plays your playlist or whatever is in it, what's it's point? I don't want to browse through it and select various previews or full tracks one at a time, I want it to DO something more functional if it takes up room on my profile (if I will ever use it. Want to use it today, but I'm having major radio issues)

2. Perhaps reconsider the branding of the top bar... I'm still trying to grasp this roller pain design. I see disconnect between it and other professional type elements on the page.

3. Complete hiding of the activity feed for users who want it. So we can hide it from all, or limit to friends and neighbors, but what if we want it gone for good. This would be a nice option. A very nice option.

4. Return of weekly neighbors somewhere.

5. +/- return of neighbors to the profile main page. I could take or leave this. some have mentioned they don't like leaving their profile to see there neighbors, well what we only say what 8 of our neighbors anyway? You had to got to the neighbors page to really truly look into your neighbors at all, and mine changed SO seldom, but that was me. Put WEEKLY neighbors in their place on the profile and I'd be on that like white on rice.

6. We NEED visual confirmation of inbox messages and New shoutbox messages without having to click the drop down. This is a MUST for usability. I hope Last.fm is listening to this. I don't need it personally but I'm going to help crusade for it, because I think there are lots of people who do. Bring back the visual notification somewhere please.

7. I'd like to see a one click solution to starting our currently playlist

8. Weekly snapshots... Okay, I guess Last.fm didn't quite get how much these where "loved" though I question how much we loved them because we had no choice but to love them or if they are really that cool. Personally I like the rolling seven day much more. I like how that works and may very seldom go look at my weekly snapshot, but I know others love them and will use them to no end. We need a quick access to these on our profile. Tab, or something.

9. The library: I am a BIG fan of the library. I love it and everything it does. I am open to it being "tweaked" I don't mind it get top billing personally (I after all use it as my 7 day charts), but I might be willing to see it drop down in importance.

10. Shoutbox position.... I'm going to leave this to stronger folk. I'm not bothered by it yet. I prefer it at the bottom. When I want it, I go directly too it. I tried to ignore it even on my own page on the old live unless I wanted to read what was there. I kind of like it out of the way personally, but it would be no true skin of my back to see it on a side bar again I suppose. I'm open to let people call for changes on this one as they see fit.

So those are some of my thoughts. I concede that a lot of complaints and issues need to be attended to, The missing reply tracker, Recommended readings long gone, Forum Bugs, Apparent journal bugs and lots of browser bugs (keep those bug reports coming, so they can be squashed), but I hope my post proves that there was some good listening going on during the beta period. This may have not been apparent to all people let into the beta at varying times, or who came to the party a little late. Sure it wasn't perfect, but I think it was certainly better than any other site upgrade I've been a part of.

Yes the main screams of "my god this layout is horrendous" went mostly unheeded. I concede that, but a lot of functionality came to what we seen now compared to what was first presented to Subscribers in may. Though I have decreased my total love of the new design a little, I am going to try to hang onto some hope.

I certainly think we need some kind of real word on the new ad stuff, as people are starting to spin their own theories and that is not helping Last.fm.

On losing our top 500 chart front. Has anyone noticed that we can now view a track list on artist pages up to 1000 tracks! Their over all chart may be at 200, but if you go to tracks you'll see multiple pages spanning to 1,000 tracks in order of popularity. This is an improvement.

I'm trying to see both sides of the coin here. I hope others can also see a little bit of the good that is being built here today. But yes we have a long way to go, and as was said one of the major issues was that communication about this "new" last.fm really is is the major cause of a lot of the venom, It was also a problem while in beta.

We may never of had the power to change most of the backbone of the new design, but they are listening. To let constructive criticism be lost amongst venom and try to take some time to really digest what we see before we post comments.

btw, using IE 7 today as I left my mac at home as my wife's computer is dead, There are quite a bit of spacing issues on the video page. Blocking off underlying text via the image. can confirm the shoutbox bug in IE7, when I start typing, the avatar jumps over.

Cheers and happy commenting everyone. Sometimes we miss the forest for the Trees, but the forest of a "bad" layout is stopping some of us I think from truly enjoying some of the new things that last.fm has to offer. I hope that the staff can take up some of the constructive criticisms even more to make it so the forest doesn't stop us from enjoying one or two of those really rare trees out there. For instance I love how much better my personal recommendations seem to be. Perhaps, for the first time personally, I may be able to actually discover something in my recommendations, In all my time here I haven't found anything particularly compelling in those and have depended on friends and random people and groups to suggest things to me... But we'll see.

So I'm off. I'd be enjoying my live charts today, if only I could get the radio to stream... New Last.fm growing pains? With all the new site upgrades in the past too bad the slow issues on release are yet to have been ironed out.

Cheers, thanks for hard work, thanks for reading. I look forward to reading comments around here.



Studogvetmed, I can't believe you wrote so much... no one's going to read that! I can't even be bothered...

From http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4350427.ece

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"It's really about using the functionality of the site to help the brand come up with an ad that is more immersive, and entertaining," Spencer Hyman, the chief operating officer of Last.fm, said.
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An example of the new "smart" adverts displays an image of a mobile phone handset which changes according to what the Last.fm user is doing. For instance, if someone is listening to Bon Jovi, the phone would appear to start playing a Bon Jovi track, showing off its MP3 player.
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Unfortunately, this seems to be the way a lot of sites are now heading, and potentially becoming even more invasive by tapping in to the data collected by your own ISP (check out http://www.phorm.com/ and http://www.badphorm.co.uk/ )

eBay too have such functionality to target their ads in a specific way based on what you're looking for etc. I don't like advertisers being given any sort of heads-up on a platter in any way.

I guess what it comes down to is that it's more things to block on the router, in AdBlock Plus, etc.

And for the what it's worth, I like the new layout (mostly) except for the current omission of the black alternate look. So apart from that, good work. Keep it up.

Thanks.

Hailya said:
Last.fm is absolutely right. A lot of people DO complain JUST because they're irritated to change. They aren't used to it yet. It's an inconvenience, but only until people get used to it. Which won't be too terribly long.

People can get used to many bad things. It's not very nice to force them to do it though.

uddiyana said:
Well, collapsible widgets would be the first and most important step to some healthy improvements here.

As well as pretty quick and easy to do, so they should really be top priority.

What I don't get is why all these people are complaining about Last.FM becoming more like MySpace.... and then complaining they can't skin it like they can in MySpace... or that they can't access the Shoutbox as easily as they can in MySpace...

I hated the new design for approximately half a minute. Then I saw what they were trying to do, and I loved it. Okay so there are some flaws - there always are on a site redesign. The site is also extremely slow on every design launch. That's because everyone is checking it out at once and not because they designed it that way.

I don't really give a crap about shoutboxes. I know a lot of people do, but I like the fact that the shoutbox has been moved out of the way, my friends and I always use the PM feature instead anyway - and I agree that the new message notification needs to be more prominent - maybe a little indicator between the search bar and the drop-down menu, or maybe next to the language selector (not next to log-out link as potential for wrong-clickage).

The new Library. I love the new Library section itself, specifically the Music and Loved Tracks tabs. (I never properly used the Playlist or Tags, not as much as I could/should have).
BUT - I *don't* like how the Library appears in my Profile page when the exact same info is just below it in chart form. And I don't like how it appears on the Home page. It tells me what has been 'recently added' but the tracks which appear were not recently added - the artist was but not that track. Misleading.

We HAVE to have the weekly charts back again. Instantly-updated rolling charts are fantastically awesome but they still need to be compared against a fixed time period.
What beats comparing your Weekly Chart to your Overall Chart on a Monday evening, to see how much the artist/track has climbed? I'll tell you what beats it: Nothing.
As others have said, we're lazy. I don't want to have to time it right at the same point every Sunday. I don't want to have to do 4 navigations to find it. From Home: click nav drop down (1), click Profile (2), middle-click Chart to open new tab (3), click Snapshot (4). Too many clicks when they used to be next to each other, or at most a single new tab click to get the full list.

--
EDIT - Actually that drop-down... maybe it could be made to appear on mouseover? I know that can be annoying on some sites and we don't want all the gears to do it else you'd get 'em everywhere. I think that one would work.
--

There needs to be some form of neighbours summary somewhere on the profile. Something short.

I'd quite like to see the home page go back to having the last 3 tracks played by my friends, that was very interesting, seeing their music habits in REAL TIME! Ultra cool. Removed for no apparent reason although someone said above, it got taken out in Beta because people didn't like it. I can only assume those people are fools 'cos I can't imagine who won't love it.

Potentially the best feature of all - and I'm still exploring - is the ability to Love and Tag in the recently played list on the profile page, in case you forget or don't have time to do it in the system tray app. I've been waiting to love tracks there for AGES! I swear we were told "it was being worked on" in the days of the Pony upgrade.

I don't particularly like the new logo, the old one was nice and curvey and lovely... but I do like the paint. Am I the only one who does? I guess the inspiration came from 'paint it black' which leads me to assume there will be a bigger choice of colours, which might work depending on the choices. A nice blue, or dark green. Not black, black is too depressing. Not bright pink. Not bright green.

Anyway those were my thoughts, take 'em or leave 'em.

I'll leave with a message to the staff:
I hope you guys pay more attention to this thread than all the others and maybe it should be pinged to everyone who worked on the project in case they get depressed reading elsewhere and miss this. Many of the last 15 pages contain some good constructive comments.

But above all:

Don't let the bastards get you down.

Cheers.

Babs_05 said:
With respect, Douglas, the new site IS more music-centred.

How so? I'm not being argumentative, I think this is a discussion well worth having among sincere people.

I say no because exposure to diversity of artists has been replaced by funnelling users to a restricted number of artists. This has happened in two major ways, which respond to your two points.

One - Recommendations and links to the musical choices of other users has been almost eliminated in favor of recommendations by Last.fm. Where are group recommendations? Where are individual recommendations? In the old dashboard they were front and center and one click brought you to dozens more recommendations. Being an Internet radio station owner, I received many recommendations from friends, artists, and labels every day, now, they are all gone. I discovered an untold number of artists who are now getting airplay on my station that way. Only Last.fm's recs are there now and are those recs pertinent at all (seldom) or just the artists Last.fm with to push? Taking away the user recommendations is a huge deal.

Two - The Library is at best redundant and really is just a waste of space. All the Library does is take up time and space with graphics. In the space that used to show the top ten most listened to artists and change from previous week now shows six bloated graphics. The Library only duplicates the Top Artists section and does it it in a needless and counter-productive way.

Three - okay there is a third - The poor navigation and layout detracts heavily from the music content. This is true on User Pages, Artist Pages, and Group Pages. It takes at least twice as long to wade through the pages to get to pertinent information. We have to click to get past all the Facebook-clone social networking features to get to the music information. At least the artist bios are still front and center, though with less text visible than before to jam in more widgets.

That's my take, for what it's worth.
Douglas

The amount of sheer self-centred histrionics coming from certain parts of last.fm's user base here, demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere, is absolutely mind-boggling. I'll be the first to agree that it would have been nice if they had waited to foist the upgrade upon everyone until all the functionality were added to the new software, but I don't see where people get off questioning the staff's assertion that that wasn't technically possible. Do the people bitching about this seriously think they have more technical expertise than last.fm's technical staff? When you're out of disk space, you're out of fucking disk space, and keeping two copies of the same database (which is exactly what they had to do during beta testing because of the different way the new site handles data) means you'll run out of disk space a lot sooner than you would otherwise, especially when the old database apparently took up vastly more disk space than the new one takes up. I agree they probably should have opened up the beta to everyone sooner, and they probably should have done a better job advertising it and making it clear when the update to the live site was going to be done - I actually didn't know about the latter myself. But the amount of BAWWWWWing that has resulted from the update ("I'd rather be shot in the head," not to mention the vast number of personal attacks on last.fm's staff in this thread alone) is completely disproportional to the severity of the problems here.

For one thing, I don't get how people can seriously believe that there's less focus on music, less focus on statistics, or less functionality in the new version of the site, unless they just haven't taken the time to look (which, judging from how impatient some of the people making complaints here seem to be, is a distinct possibility). The library gives us more statistics than we've ever had in the history of the site, and we now have the ability to delete plays from throughout our history as a member here, which is a missing feature people had wanted restored for years. Plus, we now have instantly updating charts - isn't the whole purpose of last.fm to track your listening history? That feature alone ensures that last.fm fulfils that function better than it ever has before.

The people claiming last.fm "doesn't respond to feedback" clearly haven't been paying particularly close attention - there are a large number of features which have been inserted into the new software by user request since the beta started. Granted, they haven't gotten to everything, but for them to get to everything would require them to be superhuman, or at the very least to be much larger in number (which certainly isn't going to happen if people cancel their subscriptions). When one takes into consideration the huge volume of feedback last.fm's user base has given, and the proportional size of last.fm's staff (hint: there are around eighty people) to its userbase (several hundred thousand, if memory serves), it's impossible for them to fix everyone's pet peeve at once. You'd think members could take this into account before posting sanctimonious rantings on the forums, but apparently not.

In conclusion, stop behaving as though the world revolves around as you (hint: it doesn't), that your complaints will never be addressed (hint: they will in time if you give them respectfully), or that everyone hates the new site (hint: the people who hate it are actually just a vocal minority). While I certainly have a number of complaints with the new site (and there is a lot of useful constructive criticism in this thread), they are dwarfed by the updates to functionality provided by the new software, and I'm more than willing to wait a few weeks for all the kinks to get ironed out. The amount of sheer callousness coming from certain members here is frankly disgusting, and it's a large portion of the reason I'd been avoiding commenting in the forums since the update until now, but the personal attacks on last.fm staff have simply gotten so out of hand that I felt compelled to say something. Staff, don't let the personal attacks get to you too much - some people here do appreciate the huge amount of work you've been doing.

Cassandra-Leo said:
The amount of sheer self-centred histrionics coming from certain parts of last.fm's user base here, demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere, is absolutely mind-boggling. I'll be the first to agree that it would have been nice if they had waited to foist the upgrade upon everyone until all the functionality were added to the new software, but I don't see where people get off questioning the staff's assertion that that wasn't technically possible. Do the people bitching about this seriously think they have more technical expertise than last.fm's technical staff? When you're out of disk space, you're out of fucking disk space, and keeping two copies of the same database (which is exactly what they had to do during beta testing because of the different way the new site handles data) means you'll run out of disk space a lot sooner than you would otherwise, especially when the old database apparently took up vastly more disk space than the new one takes up. they have a responsability towards their users though. if they don't have the resources to keep up an ongoing and functional website while they are still adjusting the new one then they shouldn't have tried major changes all at once but introduced the various elements little by little. if they needed to use a different type of database to support the new features, that would have been the first step: new databases, old site. then added modifications and features gradually. instead what they did was get pressured into making some major change that had to be absolutely done for whatever reason they had, probably not advertising shares as some have hinted, or maybe yes, and ended up providing simply bad service. my subscription expired today, but the thing is that if it was going on, would it be fair that i were paying for this type of service? no, it wouldn't, i'd have consumers rights to want a refund of sorts. i actually should have had one for the last 2 days, but to be entirely honest now i don't give a damn about it anymore. at any rate, this is not how businesses are run, and this is a business, it makes a profit otherwise believe me, it wouldn't be up anymore, not after becoming corporate.

I've yet to hear a defense of the new layout that says more than "shut up you whiners" LOL :p

NickHull, good post, thanks. Except for a few, this has not been being against change, it is about being against change for the worse. The thing to keep in mind is that the criticism of the new design has come from serious long-term users that have substantial and sincere feedback. I think we all agree that Last.fm could still use a lot of work. The feedback is from those serious users who want to help that work. :)

WorldFusionRadio_com said:
Babs_05 said:
With respect, Douglas, the new site IS more music-centred.

How so? I'm not being argumentative, I think this is a discussion well worth having among sincere people.

I say n