David Emery OnlineThesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt
23 January 2010
Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are
Thesixtyone redesign certainly looks nice – obviously I’m a big fan of the full window photo thing (in fact my 2009 Top 20 was going to look just like that but I ran out of time). However, I agree with the ‘revolting’ users – it’s practically impossible to use now, and it feels like lots of functionality has been lost (I don’t know if it has or not, but it’s impossible to find things that used to be there).
Pretty and experimental is all well and good, but it needs to be useable too – see the way Hype Machine does it; the main site is super useable, but then they go and do cool, different things for their 2009 Zeitgeist alongside it.
Design and usability can be done at the same time – it’s not one or the other.
Visit ➔