Current iTunes Store Design

Tasks performed and results of tasks
I first performed a genre search test on the iTunes store, which involved me seeing how deep the genre search list allowed me to go. In the iTunes store, it is only possible to go 1 level deep through the genre list, and the categories that it specifies are too vague. This is a major area I could and should improve on with my design, so I will make sure I implement a deeper genre list search that is also more comprehensive. The second task I performed with the iTunes store was to see how I could sort my search results. The iTunes store had by far the strongest sorting feature of all the music stores I tested and I must make sure at least match the wide range of sorting options in my design. Although I will not be able to implement them, I still feel it is important to show that I have thought about things like this.

Areas of difficulty with the design
I found the iTunes music store to have an extremely cluttered design, and one that didn’t expand well when viewed full size on a 20-inch monitor. The initial landing page has no area of prominence, resulting in the user’s eyes not knowing where to look when the store first boots up. The internal search function can be very hit and miss, sometimes completely ignoring artists you are trying to search for.

Visual cues in the design

1. Revolving images on top of the page (animated images)
   Images are too close to the top of the page to notice them effectively. The eyes tend to scan too fast to notice things at the top middle of a page, and the images revolve too slowly to be noticeable. User would have already clicked off by the time they had rotated.
2. Middle album icons box
   This box is right in the user’s eyesight as soon as the store loads up, and makes this a very effective position to have the new releases box in. However, the box is poorly highlighted and too full of new releases. This overloads the user and makes the box largely ineffective. A choice few new releases would have been better, and no more than 3-4. This would save the user from being overloaded with information.
3. Smaller promotional images
   These images seem to be very haphazardly placed, with not much thought gone into them to emphasise them. When viewed at full size (as in the example), the images separate from each other considerably, making them seem very disjointed from each other. There is no title to the section to tell you what these images are for. These images would have better to have been nearer the top.
4. List boxes
   No box is given emphasis over the others, and some seem unimportant. Potential promotions such as “Albums under £5” are not easy to see, and are lost in a sea of text information. Genres - one of the most important parts of a music store - is buried near the bottom. Text boxes need more emphasis on them, with the less important ones being smaller, and possibly near the bottom.

Effects and usage of colour
The pale darkish blue gives off a very bland feel to the design, and is used copiously due to the large amount of background space. It was a good decision to use a very restricted colour pallete of white and blue, but the colourful promotional images are placed so poorly that the effect has been lost.

My suggestions to improve the design would be to give the most important parts of the design brighter colours to stand out against the background, and possibly have some things in a completely different colour to draw attention to the big promotions.

The current iTunes design suffers from no clear focal point due to its lack of colour and several other contributing factors.