Tidal needs to get their UX together
So, Jayz announced that he is the new owner of Tidal and now the music industry will be saved. Good. I’m not sure the music industry needed saving, however, I’m sure glad there’s now overwhelming publicity for the only available streaming service that supports lossless audio.
Yes, I’m one of those guys, I care about lossless audio. It’s not a question of being superior, but merely a question of interest. If you’re not interested in lossless, Tidal is basically yet another streaming service that costs a little bit more, but offers high profile curated content, and soon all the music of Jayz and friends. Yes, Taylor Swift, too.
Right now, Tidal has a momentum, but will that be enough to shake off all the User Experience issues it currently has? If not, Tidal might become another company that wants to solve something big, and do that loudly, while fails to cater to the most basic requirement of any modern service: effortless usability.
Updates
After I had started to write this post, I realized that in the last 5-or-so days Tidal has already fixed a few annoyances. For starters, you can now change your password in the settings menu, whereas last time a checked it about a week ago, it was only possible if you were logged out and pretended to have forgotten it.
But that’s not the only change they made that surprised me when collecting exhibits of bad UX. I wanted to mention how terrible their desktop Mac application is, which it is, or at least was, since now the desktop application download option vanished from their web page completely.
I installed it earlier, and it’s still functional, and frankly, very much needed, since lossless playback with the web player only works if you use Google Chrome.
It seems that the Mac application is deprecated, so let’s not talk about it in extent, just have a look at the ‘unsaved state’ appearance of the red traffic light, and realize how little sense it makes in the case of an online music streaming destkop app. Infinitely little.
Exhibits
Usually, it is pretty straight-forward to handle user logins in a web application. Unfortunately, Tidal is very confusing even in this matter.
I’ve been using Tidal everyday for the past 2 weeks, yet, whenever I open a new Chrome window and load tidal.com, I am encouraged to login once again. Fine, let’s do it. So I click the login button and I am presented with three options, Twitter, Facebook and conventional e-mail + password login. If I hit the cyan-colored Login button now, I will proceed to the dashboard. If, however, I happen to click the black Try now button, I will be welcome with a registration form and a price tag.
First of all, signing up for a service is not the same thing as trying it now, second of all, I am already registered and I have an ongoing and renewed subscription. Incidentally, I filled out my login info before hitting the big black button. I don’t want to see how much I pay each month, I just want to listen to some hits, please.
The sickest thing is that Tidal already knew who I was, and in fact, I was already logged in. Had I clicked the Menu button, and then selected the Web player option (burried in the middle of the hamburger), it would already show my user info and I would be all set. Still, on the front page of Tidal, there’s no way of telling if you’re logged in or not. Ugh.
Finally, it is only a minor annoyance that when I do log in, unaware of the fact that I was already signed in, I am, before all else, presented with the page that I want to see as rarely as possible: Subscription & Payment. Hopefully, now I can find my way to the web player after all, which is as of now, the only supported way to listen to Tidal on any computer.
Even if Tidal has ridiculous User Experience issues, so far I am sticking with it, as this is the only way I can take advantage of my Hi-Fi without actually owning any records. Hopefully, they’ll soon get around to fixing these issues, and using Tidal will be as enjoyable as pleasing to my lossless-demanding ego.
