As an avid fan of house, techno, and underground dance music, I listen to music on Soundcloud very often because many of these tracks are not usually available on Spotify because they’re not officially released on labels. For #Challenge9, my team is tackling the underground dance music counter-culture, so of course I was ecstatic to listen through hours of my favorite music to craft the perfect playlist for our headphones.
Although I was already well aware of this, Soundcloud’s convoluted and confusing UX became all the more apparent to me as I attempted to go through my favorite tracks and artists. Specifically, one feature that highlights this faulty UX that Soundcloud should really fix is:
Adding songs to a playlist
As someone who makes playlists very often, this is an incredibly common feature that should be easy for me do. Yet—it took me forever to figure out how to add a song to a playlist. Once a song is playing, I had expected (as with Spotify and elsewhere) to just be able to right-click and select an option that will easily let me add a song to a playlist. Instead, when I do that, nothing happens at all, and the default menu item pops up instead:
This naturally had me wondering: how do I add this to a playlist? Strike one already, Soundcloud–user experience design should never be complicated.
After playing around for a while, I finally ended up realizing that I had to click on the actual song itself until I get on a new screen that’s exclusive for the song, at which point I could click a few more buttons to add it.
It really should not take 3-5 “steps” for me to simply understand how to add a track to a playlist. This is just one of Soundcloud’s many UX issues that should be sorted out as soon as possible, because their current user experience can be fairly frustrating.
