Last week, I talked about the old Grooveshark layout. In case you didn't read last week's entry, Grooveshark is a music service that allows you to choose the music you listen to, unlike Pandora, but does not have videos, unlike YouTube. Though the service was great, its features were difficult to discover and the layout less than ideal. Many of the greatest features were hidden in layers of menus and the layout seemed a bit clunky and hard to understand at times. The new Grooveshark layout changes this and makes the service even better than before. Best yet, it's still free.
For starters, the new layout is much prettier than the last. Not that looks are everything, but the dull blue and gray color scheme has been abandoned for a much more fresh and lively blue and yellow color scheme. However, this is only the default. Grooveshark now gives you the option of changing skins. If you are just a free user, the options are limited, but not bad. As a member, the options are even greater and continue to be added to.
Besides just looks, the layout is also much improved. Before, a majority of the options for a user could only be accessed after clicking down through about 5 or so menus. The new layout features a sidebar where you have quick access to many of the options you want off the bat when you log in. You can click "Favorites" and view the music you have "Favorite'd." If there are certain users who's music you like and whom you follow, you just click "People" in this menu. You also have quick and easy access to the playlists you have created as well as playlists featuring popular or recent music so you don't have to go hunting for it yourself.
The music queue area has also been given a makeover. Before, half of the screen was taken up by the music button options such as Play, Pause and so on. There was no way to navigate to a specific place in a song either. Your current queue normally only showed about four the songs you currently had added and required a ton of scrolling. The new layout adds a navigation bar and moves some information into a pop-up box that shows when you hover over the navigation bar. It is in this pop-up box where you have the option to share something on one of the many social networks, download the song or Favorite it. Below the navigation bar is the main queue which now can be viewed in many sizes and layouts each of which take up varying amounts of room and show different amounts of information. The ability to save or update a playlist are now obvious as well.
Finally, the main menu where you navigate through menus and so on has been simplified. The overall design is now centered around tabs as opposed to layers making things much more intuitive especially with the popularity of tabs in browsers: something that even new technology users have had some contact with. The options of "Favorite-ing" a song or playlist or album are all there in the menu and do not require extra clicking or navigating mines of menus. All in all, the entire layout of Grooveshark has received a major makeover and all for the better. Old, hard to find features were redone, menus were shuffled around and redesigned and the entire service now is a major player in the war for users who don't want to actually buy things and would prefer to just listen for free.
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