LIBRARIES ARE COOL
Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002 and now owned by CBS Interactive. It has over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. Their office is only two streets away from ours (which is cool – they invite us to their barbecues).
Last.fm’s Head of Creative – Hannah Donovan, asked us to work on a new feature they were planning for their site relaunch; the library feature.
Problem was that the key feature of Last.fm – the personalised, never-ending, radio station based on your taste – was not being used by many users who were otherwise using the site. They had found through user-testing that these users had felt stressed out by the perceived infinite nature of this concept. Their idea was to give users the concept of a finite box of music that they could play.
Last.fm is a complex platform and there were many technical hurdles to designing something that appeared simple and easy to use but we worked closely with Hannah and Matt (Head of Tech) on the information architecture of the library feature in a number of iterations.
The site relaunched successfully and we’re proud to say the library is now a core feature of the site. Just goes to show – usability testing pays ;)