Of Recordings » Rants

The new Beatport UI is fantastic.

Kevin — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 02:57:35 +0000

Many years ago I wrote up a little rant on the awful Beatport user interface, so it’s only fair that I praise their new look. It’s fantastic:

The new Beatport design is fabulous.

They fixed nearly every problem with the original. It’s made in HTML5 instead of Flash. Text is far more readable. Forward/back buttons and bookmarks work. It uses your browser’s scrolling instead of the proprietary Flash widget scrolling. And although it’s labeled “beta,” it’s far less buggy than the official Flash-based interface.

I should also mention that it’s beautiful: clean, modern, and stylish. Everyone involved with the redesign, you deserve a big old high-five.

In contrast to Beatport

Kevin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:07:20 +0000

If Beatport gets it wrong, who gets it right? Amazon! Shopping for MP3s on Amazon is exactly like shopping for books or blenders. And yes, that’s a good thing. They have spent years refining the buying process on their site– just look at the careful phrasing of the prompts that walk you through signing in and checking out. Why throw out everything you’ve learned to sell another product?

When you’ve been online for a while, you develop an intuition about how web pages work. Many of these intuitions are very subtle, and you probably won’t notice them unless you’ve studied human-computer interaction. A well-designed site like Amazon takes advantage of these expectations to make the sales process easier. A Flash gadget like Beatport’s breaks your expectations and forces you to learn new details.

Of course, Amazon is not DJ-oriented the way Beatport is. But if Beatport (or a competitor; I’m not picky) combined those great DJ features with Amazon’s ease of use, then we would have a killer online record shop. And a music fiend like me would be in heaven.

Dear Beatport: Please be slightly less terrible.

Kevin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:55:06 +0000

I am not a Luddite. Although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for actual vinyl, I am on board the digital bandwagon. Bring on the MP3s! (Ignore the fact that I am hopelessly inept at DJing in Live.) And I like a lot of things about Beatport: the broad selection of both big club hits and obscure niche tunes; the fast, high-bitrate downloads; the reasonable prices.

But their website is horrible.

Do not make a large, complicated web application in Flash! Just don’t do it! Yes, Beatport looks all high-tech and pretty. It’s also horribly difficult to use. Your browser’s back and foward buttons don’t work; if you use them, you have to start your Beatport session all over. The Beatport back and forward are in a weird place. Searching in the page doesn’t work. Bookmarks don’t work. Tabbed browsing doesn’t work. The fonts are too small, and you can’t resize them. And don’t forget the minor detail that the site was completely unusable in Linux for about a year.

The sad part is that creating an elaborate custom Flash app like this from scratch is incredibly expensive. They could have taken an open-source, web standards compliant shopping cart application and customized it for a third of the cost. (Beatport, please contact us first next time. Or hey, it’s not too late for us to fix your site…)

Eight years ago, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote a great summary of why Flash is “99% bad.” Sadly, Beatport must have missed the memo.