elhnz0 said:
It needs to look more like this

http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m264/michaelcox68/Picture1-5.png

that is excellent!

I'd also like to see the number of artists/tracks displayed being configurable within a range - say 15 (present setting) to 50 (old setting).

rea$on for update

First of all - think about the SPACE. You waste it in every way...

i could like this if information about me, friends, groups and avatar would be locatet left. now it realy sucks...

How can I share / recommend artists to groups???

elhnz0 said:
It needs to look more like this:

http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m264/michaelcox68/Picture1-5.png



Yes, that's a nicer layout.

Vivian

Actually, I think you would get a lot less complaints about the library AND the weekly charts if the Library pictures were set to last seven days by default. There should also be some sort of indication of which chart they are pulled from.

Top neighbors should be back on profile pages. I can't see how it's an improvement that they're not.

it's good to hear that charts are going to be top-500 again, but if last.fm really wanted to improve things, why wouldn't they make it top-1000 for instance. Would that be too difficult? I have listened over 900 artists, and it would be nice to have them on charts too.

I agree with all of that. More design issues here:
http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/436065
I personally think we should compile a list of everything that everyone thinks is wrong with the new design, were that possible.

Just put a button for the classic version. Sorry but this version of last.fm sucks. Seriosly, it's impossible to see shouts, or new inbox messages. Weekly charts are gone. About me part looks awful on the right coulumn. Library part takes too much space. We loved it the old way, now it's just a torture to view the profile page. Just bring it back, please...

First of all I’m blind and use a screen reader
www.gwmicro.com
www.freedomscientific.com
www.webaim.org
so I won’t be talking about visual whatsit at all. If you want to paint it canary yellow, fine by me. :D
The way the page is presented to me is linearly in the exact order in which it is coded. As I go down the page, a sighted observer watching the monitor will se a random-seeming hopping of the cursor about the page for that reason. For me there is no “top-right corner”, no “left hand side”, the shoutbox for me is actually above the about me section, right in the middle of the page, where it used to be on the bottom. I see the irony in that. LOL! It’s no big deal though, because since it is a form field I just hit c twice and I’m there. No change at all from the old site. If you’re curious and want to see somewhat of how I see the site, minus information about element types like links, form fields, etc., just hit control+a to select everything on a last.fm page, control+c to copy it to your clipboard, then open notepad and paste it in. That’s it. Or if you’re a techie type, just open the source code for the page. Here’s a little sample of what you should see, it comes from my recently listened tracks.
-
music/Red+Elvises/_/Surfing+In+Siberia?autostart
Surfing In Siberia
full track
Red Elvises
yesterday morning
music/Calverson+Community+Band/_/Miserlou+%28Dick+Dale+Cover%29?autostart
Miserlou (Dick Dale Cover)
free download
Calverson Community Band
yesterday morning
music/The+wipe+outs/_/Miserlou?autostart
Miserlou
full track
The wipe outs
yesterday morning
music/The+Lounge-O-Leers/_/Miserlou%252FSouthside?autostart
Miserlou/Southside
full track
The Lounge-O-Leers
yesterday morning
-
And now through the power of google cached pages, what it looked like on the old site.
-
Add this track to your playlist
Mario Strack
–
Aesthetics
just listened
Add this track to your playlist
Mor Amour
–
Ordinary
13 minutes ago
Add this track to your playlist
FREE
.mp3
Herrera
–
lil snow
20 minutes ago
Add this track to your playlist
FREE
.mp3
M. Persson: Sounds
–
A gap in time
37 minutes ago
That’s what I see in Firefox2. It’s a bit different in IE.

-
This layout presents a funny issue when I want to tag something on an artist, track or album page. I click the more link and it brings up the ”Love Track”, “Add to Playlist”, and “Add Tags” links, but the most obvious place for them, directly below the More link, is not where I find them. I find them at the very very bottom of the page, so I guess the programmers put them in at the very end of the source code. Once I figured that out it’s no problem, but I’m not the only one, and new people less advanced will not think to search the whole page. If nothing appears directly below the link you just clicked you naturally figure it didn’t do anything, which is exactly what I did at first, I was just hacking, not sure what that link did. Once a sighted user told me that indeed that was the link I needed to click, I dug a bit deeper and found those drop-down links. But why the 2-stage clunky process? And man is it slow, that add tags box takes forever to come down, or at least it takes forever for my screen reader to register it. Actually it’s a 3-stage process because when you’re through tagging you have to hit the ok button. I don’t mind that so much because I can immediately close the page after that, I’m not waiting for anything else at that point, and at least IE users will know the tagging was a success. Actually a good feature, though many sites use a dialogue box like Yahoo, a bit more convenient because it’s noticed every time by the software. Also, the gear to control how many artists is displayed is not visible for some reason in Firefox 2, but does appear in IE6. Only problem is that it doesn’t actually work in IE6. The best thing to do is compare your code for the more link on artist, track and album pages and this settings link on the profile pages and make the settings link code like the more link, that should fix it. They’re both drop-downs right? Might as well have the same coding. Something else I noticed is that if I’m on the tag page in my library and I want to see the tags as a list, all well and good, but if I leave page #1 it defaults back to a cloud and I’m stuck. That is to say that the other pages in show as a list simply refuse to come up like they should and instead load up the cloud. It used to be that I could create a new tag and it would show up in my tags right away, but not anymore, not in the cloud at least, and since I can’t change pages in the list without everything taking me bac to the same old cloud, I don’t know what’s going on there. If I want to see my newly created tag I have to bring up an old tag, go to the address bar, delete the name of the old tag there and write in the name of the new one. Another thing I don’t like is that I can’t edit tags anymore, if I tagged someone as
lesser known yet streamable artists and they suddenly get millions of listeners I can’t untag them. If I tag an artist with a tag he takes issue with, we’re both stuck with it. I guess that’s coming back? Seems like I saw a vague reference somewhere. Most other things I don’t like are the fact of missing features that are coming back, so I won’t mention those. I also miss being able to play an album without opening new track pages, but it’s not that big of a deal. I am sorry to see the playlists and friends’ radios for users go, but if they downgraded your license there’s nothing you can do. At least you still have an international license while Pandora is perpetually stuck in the US. What's this about non-subscribers being able to play their library? I don't believe it.
The Flash playlist/music player should be optional, and it shouldn’t even be on non-subscribers pages, about as useful to a non-subscriber as a screen door on a submarine. Personally I don’t even notice it, it’s not as if it has lots of text on it, but it’s a matter of principal. Put an add there instead.
It’s a shame that when my gift subscription runs out I won’t even be able to listen to subscribers’ tags, I actually thought that was one of the things their subscriptions were paying for. They were paying so that they can share their stations with everyone. They should get a discount now, lol.
Subscribers and their tag radio stations
will never be the same. I don’t think anyone has said it in quite that way before until now.
Many group custom radios are also trashed, because the subscriber-leader was using his/her tags for that.
Central Point: where artists and listeners meet
is a good case and point. The leader’s personal tag had all the group connections, while the global tag was a wider selection of indie artists tagged by the members. It was nice to hear just the connecteds, or listen to the wider selection, under the same tag name. A solution for this could be that we create a separate tag and the leader and a trust-worthy volunteer could tag only what they want, i.e. the connected artists, but it’s not secure of course.
Speaking of groups, the group overviews have been slammed into the description and the descriptions have been hacked up, what’s up with that?
I also agree with another user that we could have more than 10 groups or friends per page. I did give feedback toward the end of Beta that I couldn’t see all my groups with them all on one page, but surely there’s a happy medium. I was happy with 4 pages of groups instead of 20.
I agree with another poster “+ it would be nicer to see random groups at the profile, than the same groups again
and again.”. Orkut does that and it’s so cool. It would be awesome also to have random group connections back on group pages, and it would be great to have random groups display on artist Related Groups pages. As others have noted in other forums, groups devoted to a single artist have fewer members and will not ever show on the main page. Give smaller groups a chance to shine.
One comment about journals, don’t make them all load on a single page, when I click on the journals section of a friend who’s a prolific writer, I’d like to see just a list of the journal titles. Loading up so many journals takes forever. Also I’d love to have the option to turn off real-time updating of connections in journals. I haven’t tried to edit my journals yet here on the new site, but on the old site it froze my computer and my screen reader quite a bit while I was out of MSAA mode editing it. If I type too fast, I have to wait almost a full minute for it to catch up so I can navigate in there.

A few things I do like, I like the library, it’s awesome and full of cool features. I also like when I visit a track page and can see if and how many times I’ve listened to it.
I wouldn’t mind if you collapsed the library down to just a link for it and expanded the neighbours to show my top 5 like before. It would be cool to be able to display 2 charts at once again, the last 7 days along with the overall so a casual passerby won’t have to dig dig dig.
As for the weekly charts, well we have the last 7 days, and on Sunday they’ll look just like the old weeklies to me, I like seeing them roll like that, I’ll still wait for Sunday, well it’s usually Monday, for the group charts and to see if my neighbours have changed. I also edit my weekly tag cloud then, so that won’t change. I like the “unique to this group” thing on the group charts. Nobody mentions that anywhere, it’s neat. Is it hard to see or something? Not for me I noticed it a couple weeks ago on the Beta. Group radio is also cool, I hope it doesn’t also get downgraded to a subscriber only feature. A couple other things I like, I can now browse my friends, neighbors, and members of groups in Firefox 2 and see all the data I used to only see in IE like name, country, sex, recently played track, etc. Ironically I can no longer see this data in the short synopses shown on for instance, the main page of a group, that shows the most recent members. That’s kind of a funny little flip-flop. I’d rather be able to see the whole list though and not have to open up IE for that.
Please make up your minds if the indicator of how many messages I have in my inbox will be in the link or below it. It keeps going back and forth between the 2 on my homepage lol. Oh and this drop-down menu for the inbox on my profile page? Where is it? What’s it called?
I miss being able to delete a message after I’ve read it without going back to my main inbox page, not a big deal, just a minor inconvenience. It’s also annoying that my quoted message in an inbox message has no quotes and runs into the new message and the new message is always at the bottom of the post. I know that’s the convention in the sighted world, but I have to keep banging my down arrow key to get down through the quoted message to get to what the person wrote to me, or I can jump down to the reply button and work my way up. If I wrote a long message and they wrote a long message that’s going to be a pain in the neck. It would be neat if a second level heading could come before the real message so I could just hit h and go right to the message, or make it with tables so I could hit t, or if that’s not possible, add the words end quote at the end of quoted text so I could just use control+shift+F with Window Eyes or control+f with jaws to use the windows find function and skip right to that and the new message. The previous two options are best for less advanced computer users.
Not a major big deal for me, but it would be nice, and downright welcomed by less advanced users for sure.
Oh here’s something else I like very much, there are links to find users, find groups etc. on every page. You used to have to go to users and then groups to be able to search for groups, that was titanically non-intuitive, congrats for fixing that. I hope when Weekly Neighbours comes back it’ll be as elegantly placed, it was a users link on the old dashboard, only discernable from the main users link by the fact that it was a list item, that was pretty goofy, like your mum having 25 kids and naming them all Fred. I also quite like the extended shoutbox, but I know that most don’t. An alternative is to cut the shoutbox down to what it was, have the view in popup link available, and then when the shoutbox comes up in all it’s glory, it can have pages like it does now. That would be the best of both worlds. It would probably also fix the group shoutbox bug. Now if you’re reading a group’s shoutbox and you want to read page #1 in it’s entirety you must first go to page #2, and than back to page #1.
I almost hate to say this because I like to browse other peoples’ shouts back a ways, sometimes just to find out if they speak a language I speak if they have nothing in About Me. I hate to say it, but you could give folks the option to give other users access to only one page of shouts like it was before, or the whole history. Saying that, I could also say that
www.orkut.com which is another site I’m familiar with doesn’t have such an option for their scrapbook. Don’t want people to see all your scraps? Delete them.
The activity feed is pretty cool too, I’m not on Facebook nor do I visit that site. Maybe though it should be an option to get rid of it or put it on it’s own page. That, or make it expandable and just show the last datum of activity on the main page. It’s one of the least important things on a profile page, even though I think it’s cool I will agree with that. I don’t agree totally with another poster who said “the recent activity is useless at own profiles (for us to see), I caught a tagging error by looking at it, I had misspelled a tag I was building on a few artists.
I do like the activity feed on artist, album and track pages showing who recently tagged an item and what tag they used, but ironically this is now gone from tag pages themselves. I liked to go and see who was using a specific tag and how often. Either one is cool, because you can find active users as opposed to users who are just scrobbling away and haven’t visited the site since November 2006, they won’t respond to your shouts, lol. You don’t get that with top fans or neighbours, 90% of my neighbours aren’t active on the site. One of my neighbours responded just last night to a shout I left him in November 2007. I was surprised.
I like the fact that you can edit wikis for everything now, including tags. Not many will do it, but it’s nice that the possibility exists. It’ll be interesting to see what people write for tags. Now if anybody bothers to put them in we can have lyrics. I feel sorry for the mods though, you’ll never even come close to policing all that! I just thought of a cool feature you might consider, it relates to all the foreign language wikis on the English site. Allow an option to use Google language tools or Yahoo’s altavista to translate their entry. I’m not a big fan of machine translations, and often I translate wikis myself if they’re in Spanish or Portuguese, but it’s better than nothing.
I like how the about me section actually says about me now. Settings doesn’t say settings though, it says edit.
Sorry for the long post, but if I don’t write from the screen reader user’s point of view, nobody will, I can’t count on somebody else to do it, because we’re such a minority. So I hope this is constructive and someone will actually read it who can understand it.
www.webaim.org
should help you understand it.