Learning with the Fang

Inspired by JP’s recent post and the thrill of immediate fun from my new ipod touch, I decided to treat myself to the new Radiohead ‘InRainbows’ album and record the ‘convenience’ of the experience here.

By way of background let me confess that I am an Apple fanboy (from a User eXperience or UX perspective) and have decided to use the nearly seamless experience of purchasing a DRM infected file of a song I don’t like as the best practice benchmark. I’m also a radiohead fan and complete supporter of their destructively creative experiment with digital music business models – this post is purely a measure of the level of convenience of the purchase and download UX.

So, how was it?

• First hurdle was to overcome my fear of being DRM infected (so I waited a few days after release, asked some schookids, did a quick google). Decided that what I purchased probably would be DRM free but not real sure, and certainly no clue on the site. TOOK THE LEAP OF FAITH.
• The arty radiohead.com site sure lukes nice but offers very little in the way of clues as to what is about to happen.
• Hit purchase and was confronted by login or register – OK, one more online registration (annoying amount of mandatory fields)
• Now to decide the (OPTIONAL) price. After a quick conference with the kids we decided it was probably gunna be pretty good and that we should pay twenty bucks (we could always purchase it again if we felt compelled to).
• Currency Conversion – pounds is the only currency offered, there is a link to a dodgey looking currency converter so we tried that and decided on 8 pounds.
• After purchase you get a unique URL which kicks of the (rather slow) download process for the 48mb .zip. (I had some problems unzipping on my mac but it turns out the problem was between the chair and the computer – firstly didnt let the download finish, then tried to unzip to a drive with no free space – DOH)
• After that it was smooth sailing – a single folder with 10 160k, 44.1khz pure uninfected .mp3 files.
• Dragged em into iTunes, onto my iPod touch and burn to a CD for the car.
• One thing – there is bugger all metadata on the .mp3 files. Even tho the filenames indicate the sequence on the album, once in iTunes you are on your own in that regard – pity.
• Tracks seem to be in the right order on the ipod touch

So, how in(convenient) was the UX? I’m a fussy, grumpy old bastard and would say more inconvenient that convenient and certainly not seamless. By JP’s measure things will have to improve before web-scale can kick in. Imagine if I could have googled for ‘in rainbows’ on my iPod touch, puchased the song (with only a single existing password required to be entered), listen immediately then burn the CD for the car without having to feck around. When that happens we will have truly turned a corner.

p.s. Which DRM infected song I don’t like and why? The answer is in the smile on a young girl’s face in this youtube – she named the song, I found it in 2 seconds using the ‘itunes’ icon on my ipod touch over wifi – within 15 seconds she was singing with her dad – now that’s UX!

p.s.s. Even Apple fanboys can HATE DRM – check this rant, and I feel a new one coming on – having purchased a song over the air on ipod touch, how do I back it up to CD?? According to Apple, I should be able to sync it back to my computer and treat it like a regular store purchase. Can’t find any of the tunes I purchased from the ipod touch on my Mac…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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