Thread for ‘low hanging fruit’. Community improvements that should be easy to make, easy to fix.
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While a bit more ambitious on first glance, I think that both Beacons and Segue have a good balance of effort vs reward. Beacons, especially, and its related ideas should be easy to implement and are higher priority in my view. Segue is a bigger undertaking, but I think it would be a huge win relative to the effort.
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On the player, a renaming from “Random” to “Wander” (or something in the same spirit), would be a really easy quick win. I feel that this feature/section is misnamed and causes user frustration. Even now after months of using the player, I will instinctively click on Random occasionally with the aim of shuffling the current list of songs I’m looking at, only to lose my place in the player and arrive on the “Random” section.
I also think that the symbol used should also be changed, as using what is now universally understood to be the “Shuffle” symbol is similarly misleading.
I propose switching it to:
↝ wander
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Interesting. I didn’t feel random as something broken. I frequently use this feature and hadn’t felt a deficiency. Wonder what others think.
Also, wondering what others see as broken. And how to confirm and proceed, or not, among priorities?
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems apt. But also, people have different ideas about what needs fixing.
Looking forward to see how the conversation goes.
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Yeah, at this point I know how Random works so I only rarely absent-mindedly click it in order to shuffle things. However, I think that from a design perspective, and new-user perspective, it is unintuitive and potentially frustrating. And I think that giving it a more unique label and symbol would make it more obvious to new users what it doesn’t do, and subsequently introduce them more naturally to what it actually does do.
Or said differently, I think relabeling Random would help a user’s first experience with the feature will be more positive and exploratory, and reduces potential for misinterpretation.
Maybe ‘Quick Fixes’ is a category? With each fix a thread/topic?
Sure! But let’s take that as it comes and see first what kind of traction this thread gets first.
In my opinion both interpretations of random are correct. The problem seems to be on which tracks it is applied. If I understood well, the current random functionality is applied to Resonate’s music catalogue as a whole, while the random functionality that is used most frequently in other music streaming services is applied to specific collections of songs.
I think that labeling the current Resonate “random” functionality as “wander” will prevent confusions like the one @Hakanto shared, the only doubt is if “wander” could create other confusions, like a function that is not standard and not well understood. But that issue could be solved with proper labeling and a good player controls explanation.
For Top Favourites - once clicking on it there could be a bit of a description: “Top Favourites - the most favourited tracks from Resonate users”
Right now I don’t know if it means the tracks I played the most or the community tracks.
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Hi @onapoli
Also worth mentioning in this thread that we have an exciting proposal in for EU funding on a search and discovery feature that proposes @Hakanto’s Segue feature as an early step in joint work between FutureModern and Resonate on Aeria:
aeria is an open-source standard for human-led, AI-augmented music discovery based on immersive, dynamic data visualization.
using advanced internetworked data visualization techniques, it displays music, artists and fandoms in virtual music feature spaces instead of rigid lists or grids. visual cues symbolize human-meaningful insights. for instance, we signify
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artists as balls, and ties between artists, such as social media interactions or collaborations, as sticks connecting the balls
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relatedness with proximity, so that communities of related artists appear as clusters of balls distinct from other clusters
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influence, not popularity, with ball size
aeria conducts
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audio analysis via digital signals processing to illustrate the sonic elements of music itself
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network analysis on social media to visualize the cultural context around music.
@Hakanto’s suggestions on Segue are a key part of that roadmap… our thoughts were:
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Aeria algorithm-created metadata will be populated to the Resonate Trackserver API.
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Members explore the metadata to create and optionally share simple playlists (track groups) or segues between tracks, acting as human guides or pathfinders.
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Listeners and curators will be able to provide key early human feedback on the experience of metadata browsing in parallel with the development of immersive graphical UX design.
We hope to hear very soon if we have won the funding. …But even if we don’t win it I think we have a great partnership with Futuremodern on taking this forward, a step at a time.
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Idea for playlist solutions…
Halloween Hackathon…
with Prizes?
Looks promising @Nick_M. I also think it is worth working on this great idea, no matter what happens.
Hi Kev @SolarDesalination … @auggod and I have been looking at that ageing Top Favourites list this week. It really is very static and boring.
The way it works now is to look for valid tracks that have been favourited by ANYONE since inception of Resonate and then it counts up the number of favourites EVERYONE has added, irrespective of WHEN they were favourited.
There is no sense of ‘recent’ or ‘trending’ at all. The big numbers come top of the list of 50. This makes the list very biased in favour of catalog added long ago, because it has had less time to collect favourite status. As @Hakanto says, because of a lack of proper playlisting, their own favourites list is also used by some rather like a ‘bookmarking’ facility, rather than a true favourite.
We think we could perhaps change it by compensating for the ‘age’ of the favourite (there’s a number we can use as a ‘proxy’ for a date - bigger number = later) that we can sum up so the more recently favourited get a much bigger score. We fiddled a bit with that by dividing the resulting total by the number of favourites (so it was a sort of average score across the numbers) and then added a threshold value (minimum number of favourites before they get in the list), to enable us to tweak what is selected. If the number is low, the bias is for more recently ‘favourited’
fresh tracks. If the number is high, it’s more like the ‘all-time’ favourites again. @auggod suggested we could give the user the option to change the value behind buttons like like fresh, upcoming, popular (all time) There is a photo website that does something similar: 500px.com
We’re testing this out at the moment:
The list above is ordered by the ‘averaged’ sum by count and it shows that more favourited tracks don’t always come top.
… it’s not an exact science, but having the ability to tweak the list might be perceived as valuable… and it’s easy to do. = ‘Quick Win’ ?
Most folks won’t be interested in exactly how the ranking is done, but we could put the details of the scoring in an faq if necessary.
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I don’t know, maybe an all time favourite list and a ‘this week’s hot tracks’ list additionally?
I just want to add, I am sure there are a lot of artists and listeners who have no tech or coding skills - like me. So I appreciate all the efforts volunteers are putting in to improve and maintain Resonate, and my lack of volunteering is not out of laziness, but out of a lack of knowledge.
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Favicon updated! I made it white-logo-on-black-circle so that it contrasts with the black-logo-on-white-circle of the resonate player. I also updated the android homescreen icon, so if you use Android and save the forum to your homescreen it will have a white on black circle icon.
A question for iOS users – when you add a website to your homescreen using iOS, what shape is the icon that is created? Circular? Let me know and I can update the iOS homescreen/webapp icon as well.
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One quick (?) fix: Figure out what is the ‘root’ thread of this forum and define what is the purpose, what is the methodology behind using ‘categories’…
My ‘default’ branch has been ‘community conversations’ where most of the activity has been but now I see new threads starting at a ‘root’ level. Or rather, I didn’t see them because they didn’t show up in ‘Community Conversations’…
Should ‘Uncategorized’ be the root thread?
Maybe this is my ‘user’ problem… in which case having a FAQ for best practices in the forum would be helpful…
A Quick Fix?
[Meanwhile, I’ll probably continue posting ‘generic’ topics into ‘community conversations’.]
for what it is worth I can say with confidence that the existing category/topic structrues were established BEFORE there were any users or usage… ie, they were built without much intention and there may be no ‘legacy’ reason to keep them in place if there is a more rational approach.
This new sort / selection is now IN for Top Favourites on the player. 
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