I love RSS feeds.  More information coming to me with less action on part.  I have my Google Reader set up for User Experience and Usability updates; I was surprised to see a link that read “Songza.  Find it.  Play it.  Share it.” It caught my attention so I clicked.  Songza is an on-line music site but users can only listen to songs, not download them. It is free and users can select exactly the song or artist they want to hear (unlike Rhapsody or Last.fm), and does not require them to subscribe or pay for its services. 

How did a link to a music site appear in my usability RSS?  The real purpose of creating Songza was not to add another player to the internet music scene; it was created to illustrate a “humane interface”.  It is the “brain-child” of Aza Raskin, president of software company Humanized, Inc. in Chicago The term “humane interface” was first coined by his father, Jef Raskin, a founder of Apple Macintrosh and author of “The Human Interface.”

The philosophy behind a “humane interface” is that computers can and should be easy to use.  The core principal of this philosophy is that the user should not do more work than necessary.  Sounds obvious but it so rarely applied to web sites.  Clean design is often lost to business decisions and rushed code.  The irony being that the business will succeed if the user can easily accomplish their task and the rushed code becomes a nightmare when it is time to enhance or upgrade the site!  U sers lose their concentration when the flow of their actions is not intuitive.  They never achieve the comfort level necessary to perform tasks without conscious thought and are distracted from the content and business intentions on the web site....a big handicap when another, competing site is only a click or two away. 

Check out Songza.com for the music and the beautiful interface. 

By the way—not only have I found a great new on-line music source, I was inspired to go back to work the next day and transform a search interface I am working on.  It has nothing to do with music and actually involves a much more complex, layered query than Songza.  But I bet if I showed you my before and after screen designs you would recognize the inspiration! 

I really like that all the features are one simple click away.  Very easy to navigate.  Apparently they are adding more features since the site has only been live for 3 weeks.  Doesn’t seem like it needs much more to me, though1

By Kate on November 21, 2007

This is like the Public Library, except instead of checking out books, you check out songs.  And the interface is super clean...nice!

By Hannah on November 21, 2007

I just checked this out and thought it looked great.  Site design is nice and clean.

By Gregory Maher on December 09, 2007