Musebin Website Exploration
- Client
Sawhorse Media - url
no longer online - Date
September 2008
Musebin.com was a short-lived wonder on the web, allowing music nerds all around the web to spew about their favorite (and least favorite) albums in 140 characters or less. They lasted only a short year, but in that time the community grew quickly and quite a lot of fun was had.
Being the music fanatics we are here at Love Has No Logic we were ecstatic when our friends at Sawhorse Media asked us to help them in the early stages with design concepts for their new project. While we went back and forth with various ideas for months, we’re posting a few of our favorite here.
The first concept posted also happened to be our first take on the wireframes they had whipped up. In the early days, the review was king, and it shows. The main real estate on the screen was given to a main review set atop a backdrop of the album cover. Next to it was all the album information and an easy way to scan back and forth through recent reviews. As you scanned down the page you were able to quickly add your own reviews, see more recent reviews, see all sorts of power rankings for albums, artists and users and finally sign up for various forms of updates, including good ol’ fashion postcard updates. It was quite a good time working with this much content on a single page and making it all flow from one thing to the next in a logical way. However, what got lost was the fact that it wasn’t just a single review, but rather an entire selection of reviews that you could browse, as if you were at a record store.
That’s what led to the second round of designs I’m showing you here. The designs for this exploration began to show that this was only a single review in a long string of reviews. A version was done with the review taking up less real estate and the top of the album sticking out as if it was sitting in the shelves of a record store. Finally, more focus was placed on the conversation that would arise in the comments made on each review. Musebin was about community just as much as it was about music. Giving the comments more focus helped to foster that community. However, this still stayed quite true to the original concepts, and it was time to start from scratch. That’s where the next exploration came from.
In testing the site during development, there were users that were having troubles understanding what they were supposed to do. They understood what they were looking at, just not how they could contribute. So, for this round we set about creating two landing pages. The first, if the user was a first time visitor, or hadn’t visited in a long while, would show them a site tour if they wished, and made it quite easy to sign up for an account or start writing reviews. It also shrank the size of the review so that you saw a collection of recent reviews at first rather than one main review. The second page welcomed the visitor back to the site if they were logged in or visited recently. The list of recent reviews became front and center as they would be interested in recent content. They still had easy access at the top of the screen to begin writing their own reviews, to view site rankings, get updates or more. Finally, we created an interior page for each review that showed all the details for the album, the conversation that occurred about the album and other recent reviews they could browse. All in all it was a much more clear and user defined path through the site that we feel worked wonderfully.
Though Musebin flourished in the beginning, as Sawhorse changed their focus as a company, Musebin floundered and eventually shut their doors. While we’re sad it’s gone, we quite enjoyed our time spent as amateur critics on the site.