Albums

The current solution in iTunes
iTunes has a lot of functionality and features, but some of us prefer to listen to complete albums. While browsing your music library, you can can filter by artists or albums. But the album view doesn’t clearly separate the artists, and the artists view shows the full tracklist for each album, which wastes a lot of space and means that you can’t get an overview of all of an artist’s albums at a glance. Further, an album is a closed work of art with its own story, but iTunes doesn’t adequately present this.

The approach of ALBUMS
ALBUMS combines the best of iTunes’ albums and artists views to let you listen to complete albums. Artists are divided according to their own discography with all albums ordered by release dates and visualized in an interactive timeline that quickly gives the user an idea of how many albums were released and how much time elapsed between the releases. Additional information is presented in a unique color scheme for every album, and similar albums can be discovered through an endless browsing experience. Hard but smart, you can’t skip tracks, though, as the playlist accepts complete albums only.

Timeline
Every discography has an interactive timeline that quickly gives the user an idea of how many albums were released and how much time elapsed between the releases.
Artists have their own timeline based on the discography. Mouse Over highlights the current album.

Connections
Every focused album has its own connection tab enabling infinite browsing through the music library.
Connections to other albums can be explored by infinite browsing.

Playlist
For a continuous playback experience a playlist is indispensable—but this playlist accepts complete albums only. Three albums in the playlist—that’s enough music for the next two hours. Lean back and just enjoy the melodies.

Conclusion
After I have done a lot of design of mobile and web applications, this was my first experience with a desktop application. OS X provides a detailed style guide, but for an appropriate degree of flexibility I had to design my own elements. For a good usability, I tried to create a symbiotic relationship with the platform standards. Once again, focusing to a use case facilitates visual understanding of the program.