Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

Here’s a demonstration of the core difference. Slashdot.org is down (at the time of writing), so do I go to Facebook and yell this out to my friends? Hell no, I haven’t got enough nerdy buddies that would care about it. But what about on Twitter?

Nowadays the best way to determine whether a popular online service is down just for you or the entire web population is to do a search on Twitter. There is always going to be some people wondering the exact same question as you, to the extent that they will go through the effort of tweeting about it. That’s the real-time pulse that Google is still missing.

If only Twitter’s front page would be designed in a search oriented way, driving people towards entering search terms instead of new tweets (who needs more of them, anyway?), the perception of the service could be altered in a quite profound way. Until then, the average user will upon initial viewing just see it as Facebook without Farmville and Mafia Wars. For some people, that will of course be reason enough already.

Nevertheless, some changes in the behaviour and assumptions of the web audience are so profound that you shouldn’t really even dare to assume that you have an option whether to comply with them or not. One such assumption is the ability to search. The sad fact of the matter is that a huge portion of casual surfers don’t even know what is a browser, since all they do is search through Google, even for the URL to a site they want to visit. Hell, if it wasn’t for the smart address bar in Firefox that let’s me access pages from my browser history so painlessly, even I might be lazy enough to just google the name, instead of wondering about .com/.net/.fi.

In the current climate, you are then pretty safe to assume that most users enter your site as a result of a search (hence the popularity of SEO). What happens then after they reach your site? Well, unless they were lucky enough to land on the exact right page, I bet they’d prefer to do a search on the content of the site. The absolute quickes way to information is a search box, or at least it should be, when the search is working like Google is. Even if the results are not quite as well organized, it’s still useful when the visitor is looking for some more rare keyword.

How can it then be that in 2009 there is still an incredibly large portion of midsize retailer sites that are lacking the search functionality altogether? Take this one example: Koti-Idea furniture store.

There are 2 tempting boxes in the top right corner, but that turn’s out to be the account login, so most visitors will not be interested on that. There’s a shopping basket on the bottom left, but I don’t see anything to add to it yet. There’s even an application (IE only) for designing your own bookcases or sofas, which sounds all fine and dandy. However, I can’t get to the product which I have in my mind, since there’s no box to type in the name and click “search”. Instead, I would need to start thinking in categories and navigating menus. How much fun will it be to start guessing the taxonomy adopted for this particular store, browsing through one category after another, just in case you would run into the product you are, well, searching for.

Upon my quest for new furniture I ran into several sites that lacked any means of searching for the products that were hidden somewhere deep in the folder structure. Sure, I could have always gone back to Google and do an advanced search for hits from that particular site. In the non-eCommerce world that would have been roughly the equivalent of walking into a store, then going back home and returning with a credit card, just because the cashier didn’t accept cash payment. Now wouldn’t you just rather walk to the store next door instead?