Week 9 - Old Grooveshark Layout

This week I will be discussing the original Grooveshark layout and then, next week, I will compare and contrast it to the improvements and changes they made: some for better, some worse. For those who are unaware of Grooveshark, it is essentially an online music player similar to a blend between YouTube and Pandora. Like Pandora, it plays only music and not video and therefore taxes your computer less; however, like YouTube, you can choose what you want to play and make playlists to fit what you like.

The original Grooveshark layout was somewhat unorthodox, but not unwieldy. The main screen was straightforward and contained simply a search bar to find music, albums, playlists and so on. In addition to the search bar, there were also smaller menu choices above that allowed you to view playlists you had made or songs you had "favorited." Navigation within Grooveshark was in a sort of "layered" manner. By this, I mean that as you opened new menu after new menu, the latest one would be layered over the other although the last one would be slightly viewable, so it could be returned to when clicked.

So, for example, if you searched Viva La Vida, search results grouped by song, album, etc. would show up. You might click album because you are looking for the whole CD and that layer would show up. Then maybe you click the album submitted by user ILoveColdplay and this layer would show up with the songs. Then, maybe you click a song to see its information and the song information layer shows up. You read what you want to, find it isn't even the right song, so you click the album results layer and the previous two layers above it disappear. You continue to do this until you find what you want and then add the album or a few songs to your active queue (the songs you are playing during the current session.

This layout is somewhat useful because you can go back to whatever layer you are interested in, but, much of the time, when I was using Grooveshark, I found that I barely ever went back more than one layer and there were tons of layers below the one I was looking at that cluttered the screen and were probably confusing to users who were less familiar with such services or technology in general.

In addition to the navigation of menus, there was also, as mentioned above, the ability to add songs to a current queue as well as to favorite songs. "Favoriting" songs is straight forward and easy as is adding songs to the queue, but it actually took me some time to figure out that you can actually save a queue as a playlist under your username (if you make one which you do not have to do). The options to complete such an action were somewhat hidden which was unfortunate. Additionally, the last thing I learned was that you could actually favorite other peoples' playlists or albums. This is extremely useful, so you don't create your own playlists from other peoples and then have those show up as a duplicate, but the feature is buried under about five layers an then not emphasized.

All in all, Grooveshark is a GREAT service because it allows you to play tons of music and you can choose it all yourself. You can create and save playlists or just save other peoples' playlists to listen to later. Unfortunately, many of the great features of Grooveshark are hard to discover especially for people who are not used to using such interfaces. Next week, I will discuss the improvements the makers of Grooveshark made to the interface and how it makes it much more accessible to all types of users.