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YouTube Music’s new “Samples” feature is an absolutely genius idea. It’s like having YouTube Shorts-style music discovery – and I’m obsessed with it. Short, 30-second excerpts of high-quality music videos and artists are the perfect fix for my never-ending thirst for new tunes. But as much as I’ve found myself mindlessly scrolling through them, the user experience (UX) design has one very annoying issue.
I don’t mean to be rude, but whoever designed this needs a serious lesson in UX design. I don’t know if it’s just me, but the experience of liking a sample and then trying to further interact with a song is frustrating as hell. When I tap the like button, a toast notification appears at the bottom of the screen, blocking my ability to access the three dots ‘more’ options button. The only way to get rid of it is to swipe it away or wait about five or so seconds for it to disappear on its own.
If I truly love a song and want to explore more from that artist, the artist’s page is then hidden in the more options menu…which is covered by that notification. Furthermore, every time I tap ‘Add to library’ option, guess what? That same toast notification comes back to haunt me. Why, Google, why? So, if I want to add it to my library, and then go back into that menu to see the artist or really anything else, I’m in a cycle of dismissing several toast notifications – see my issue?
Moreover, the menu doesn’t even have an option for ‘Go to Album’. Sure, you can tap on the sample’s cover art to get to the album, which is intuitive enough, but it feels like the option should be available alongside ‘Go to artist’. This may seem like a minor gripe, but it’s a missed opportunity to streamline Samples – oh well.
Does any of this annoy you as much as it does me? If you can’t already tell, I’m a big proponent of good UX design, and it may be because I’ve spent many years designing websites and such. That’s now bleeding into how I use and interact with Google’s apps, and I’m starting to notice that whoever’s in charge over there makes some very questionable choices on basic and essential aspects of the services I use daily.
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