MusicBrainz Create Artist Page

MusicBrainz
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Wow! Love the look and so glad this is moving ahead.

Even if everyone isn’t a fan of things looking new and shiny, imo we need this if MB wants to attract editors/be a viable and competitive DB.

Personally I think a productive way to think about the feedback would be:

  • new users (not the current captive audience, which will stay regardless of look, unless you really derp it up) are your target audience for the look and feel
  • current users are then be-all and end-all when it comes to function. They have spent countless hours on MB and if you’re making them click more to do something they will signal the pain it will cause (including to new users)

Anyway, I would take the feedback re spreading these out over multiple pages seriously. It adds clicks to the workflow and doesn’t allow for a full overview.

How about a combination of the two? Mockup below.

add artist-01 2022-01-21
add artist-01 2022-01-212880×2682 461 KB

btw I would recommend showing desktop friendly mockups before mobile mockups to avoid the MB community (justifiably) losing their sh*t :stuck_out_tongue:

note: there’s probably a really clever way to do guidelines and docs that I don’t know about. Clcik a button and then mousover elements to display the relevant section of the guidelines? There must be something that other sites are doing that is great!

note 2: oops I forgot to mention, if we are trying to make this new user friendly a very easy win is to point out ‘required fields’ in some way

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14

I’ll put this into a separate post. This mockup might not be concerned with colours and font sizes etc but I still have to ask:

Do we have a style/guidelines for the overall look and feel of MB (and potentially other MetaBrainz sites) that is coming together? That this page is using?

We only need stuff like “what size is field title text for desktop and then mobile” worked out once. Are we using blue buttons across the whole site? What is the % width of main page elements?

It’s fun to bang out mockups but if anyone is being paid to do this/has the MB overhaul under their purview can they please do the work and define the site styles first.

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15

I agree that this is needed, if there isn’t one already. If you don’t have a graphical profile you often end up wasting a lot of time. I know that the it feels slow and tedious in the beginning, and that you often feel like jumping ahead to the mockup stage, but you will save time in the long run if you do the graphical profile first.

The two things that you generally should start with when you are working with graphic design is to:

  1. Do research on the target audience (who they are, what are their needs, what they want, things that could cause problems in relation to the design, etc) and then this leads to:
  2. Create a graphical profile with font size, colours, the size of images, and all that other stuff. A few subsections might be needed perhaps “new user” (that has extra “look here symbols”, “info boxes” and that sort of thing), “old/standard/advanced users”, and users that differentiate from those catch-all groups in some other way. In this case I guess that would be how you are going to handle things like dyslexia, colour blindness and visual impairment.

Anyway, I remember that the previous community manager mentioned something about this, when they asked the community for suggestions for a new Twitter banner. There were a few that were rejected because they didn’t fit the MB profile (“grey colour” being one of them iirc).

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I really think this design looks great! The idea is :fire:. Thanks for having shared this @aerozol !

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@aerozol we do have a design system in place where we aim to add these guidelines. Thanks for pointing about the style guidelines, I’ll most probably pick this up and document whatever I can and share it to fetch opinions on the same.
This would be a great thing to do since we have the docsprint ongoing. I’ll look to make this a priority.

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18

I would be delighted to have a better Create Artist page. But “better” implies “suited to certain requirements”, and this design doesn’t particularly address my requirements. I would like to put my desired features on the table.

My biggest obstacle to using MusicBrainz is that it takes too long to add a Release. The Releases I add most often are classical music releases by little-known local musicians. Thus the biggest time taken to add a Release is to add Artist entries for all the local musicians involved in a Release, who are usually not yet in MusicBrainz.

A common way Artist entries are unsatisfactory is that they are ambiguous. I see a “Mike Smith” on my Release, I see a “Mike Smith” in MusicBrainz; are they the same person? The most powerful way to disambiguate an Artist release is by Relationships: lots of Relationships, to external links (artist’s website, bios, Wikipedia entry) and to other Artists (groups in which the artist participates). Adding Relationships from musician to group has the added benefit that it protects the new Artist entry from being deleted automatically in a few days due to being unconnected.

Note that disambiguation strings are absolutely mandatory, in my humble personal style, but they are not sufficient. Relationships describe an Artist far beyond what disambiguation strings can do.

The most frustrating and difficult part of adding Relationships to a new Artist is when the related group Artist is also missing from MusicBrainz. I then have a partially-completed Create (person) Artist dialogue box open, and on top of it another Create (group) Artist dialogue box. The box on top does not have the edit note re-use or other features of the main Create Artist dialogue box.

So, the change that would most speed up my MusicBrainz use and reduce my frustration would be a way to let me Create an Artist, and Create several related Artists, complete with Relationships between them and lots of external links to each. I would like to be able to build up many of these Create Artist actions in parallel, going back and forth to tweak each one. Maybe each Create related Artist screen becomes more entries in the multi-step flow of the original Create Artist.

I would like the Relationship lookup to make it easier to check, if I find an Artist to use in a relationship, whether this is in fact the correct Artist. I would like to be able to see the entire Artist entry pop up, including their disambiguation string and their dates and their releases, so that I could see if the Artists which MusicBrainz found is consistent with the Artist I want a Relationship to.

If a UI redesign could improve this aspect of making a well-populated Artist entry, complete with lots of external links and Relationships, it would improve my productivity in MusicBrainz, and maybe help me work through my backlog of unentered Releases.

5 Likes
19

People have said a lot about how they don’t like multiple pages to add an artist so I’m just gonna drop a “same” on that. One thing I do like is how it’s more centered instead of everything just shoved to the left on the page. For widescreen monitors it always looks weird having 80% of the right of the screen being blank.

For @aerozol’s example, I’m not a fan of the big padding around everything, especially the vertical padding. Having more info on the screen at once is good, especially when going through and doing quick double-checks before hitting submit. Extra padding just makes me have to scroll more and even potentially get lost if the page is too big.

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Regarding the field for Disambiguation: make sure it is long enough to show the 80th percentile length of disambiguation strings presently in the database, or alternatively, long enough to show a string like “Canadian composer and vocalist, fl. early 21c”.

Regarding the field for Area: this will be a lookup. Be sure there is enough horizontal and vertical room for results to appear as a pop-up menu. In the present UI, if you click in the field but don’t type anything, a menu appears with the most recent results. Frequently, the entry I want is in this list, so I just click on it. Please design to make this workflow efficient.

Please keep the buttons which copy from Name to Sortname, either unchanged or with a swap of FamilyName, PersonalName. I use those buttons in 95% of the Artists I create.

Can you make it more efficient to select Type, than having a pop-up menu? I suspect that the vast majority of the entries will be Person or Group. Can we make it possible to choose one of these with just a single click? Maybe pre-populate the choice based on which button to copy name to sortname the editor clicked: if copy with swap, Artist is likely a Person, if copy unswapped, Artist is likely a Group.

I suggest that for Disambiguation, we should prompt the contributor to fill in something, rather than leaving the field blank.

The sequence of these fields is not ideal. Think about the order in which these facts will be in an editor’s mind. I think a better order is: Name, Sortname, Type, Gender (if applicable), Area, Disambiguation. I think the IPI Codes could be dropped much lower down the workflow. Personally, I have never used them as far as I know.

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21

Agreed. btw I haven’t changed any padding (cause I have a day job), just put a note in the margin that it should be more compact :+1:

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Thanks for the review @justcheckingitout !!
Going with the feedback, would go with a single page design and will make sure that it doesn’t get confusing.

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Must have missed that one out, will make sure add button is there multiple URLs. Thank you for the review @IvanDobsky. Will go with something like aerozol’s design.

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Thanks for the feedback @Lotheric. I will go with single page screen itself as suggested by most of you.

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Thanks for your feedback @teethfairy. Seems multi-page would be quite distracting for most of the users. So, going with the feedback will make the page in a single page itself.
Along with that I will make sure that the new page is good in accessibility.

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26

Agree that these little buttons are powerful time saving gems
image

Would be nice to keep the help text pop-up on the right hand side. I’ll still sometimes click on guideline links within that to check on something, and very valuable to a noob who doesn’t understand type.

One thing I like about @aerozol’s mockup is “pages” are still available for a small screen user, and a quick way to jump down the page is available with the section buttons.

Like others on this thread, my focus jumps up and down a page as I am entering data. I recognise @Jim_DeLaHunt’s “adding loads of artists in the middle of adding a release” (especially if I dive into performers :laughing:) A dozen pages open while copying in many reference links from elsewhere as I charge down the data rabbit hole.

Often the first thing I have in hand is a Discogs/Wikidata link or Relationship I want to paste, then jump to the top and fill in the important data at the top afterwards. This is not going to be obvious during design, but I doubt I am the only one filling that page in an odd order.

A final check is also important. But I am from the old skool who wants to fill the large monitor with stuff to see in one glance and understand we also need to find a way to make it equally accessible to phone users.

@amoggh thanks for listening.

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I think for phone users we should think about how to change edit pages last, after having changed all the display pages first.

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Why would anyone ever use their phone on Musicbrainz? I’ve tried to use Musicbrainz just to even find info on relationships, when I hear a song on the radio, etc. and I agree it’s horrible to use on a phone. But I hope they aren’t redesigning all of Musicbrainz to work on a phone. I can’t use Musicbrainz anymore without all the scripts. You can’t use any of that on Safari, can you? And will this redesign mess up all the existing scripts we use on Chrome, etc.?

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because many people don’t have computers, only have time to edit on their phone on bus/train rides, to look at their collections, etc.

i don’t understand this question. making websites more mobile-friendly is good and necessary. over half of all internet traffic is through mobile phones. there’s not really a downside to redesign websites to work on phones… there will always still be the desktop view.

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I use MusicBrainz on my phone fairly often myself, usually just for quick edits, adding Spotify releases with Atisket, and to look up my music collection while shopping. now that I’ve started with Userscripts, I am using my PC more, and if I can choose between mobile and PC, I’ll most always use PC.

this is another question of Accessibility in my opinion; if more people can use MusicBrainz, I think that’s better all around.

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The point of the question was not to make the website look like it’s a phone app. I just hope that they are not making the existing web design look like an app. I have no issue with improvements via a phone app. Which is currently not available to iPhone users. I’d much rather that for people that want to use their phone than redesigning the site to how it would best look on a phone.

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Not having all of MB work on a phone is fine for me as well, but then we may as well already carve and date MB’s headstone ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I would like this site to keep going when I’m dead and it’s just these flippin’ youngsters* left. They, unfortunately, use phones for everything.

That said I would also be super mad if an update made something worse for anybody/us desktop users. So I hear ya xo

*and people of all ages in emerging countries

1 Like