If we’re also spitballing more general wishes for a website redesign, I would again come back to the search form I mentioned earlier.
Remove the confusing choice between three different search types.
Choosing between the search types requires technical knowledge that should ideally only be relevant to the people running the Musicbrainz servers. Especially “Direct database search” feels like a holdover from the time before we had fast indexing. Having the advanced search options should be the default, IMO.
Add a UI for the advanced search filters.
They are potentially very powerful for finding what one is looking for, but the currently used syntax is extremely undiscovered and barely usable for people who are not already programmers.
Yes! I always forget those are there, and when I do remember, they’re sometimes difficult to get my head around, especially for advanced advanced searches…
I also second more prominent links to the forum as well as the other projects (BB, AB, etc.). I feel like I scoured the website for a forum a couple months ago, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Ended up just happening to notice the link tucked away at the bottom of the page in that tiny font.
I’m sure you’re probably talking about the search bar at the top of the page, not the search bar when you’re adding relationships and whatnot.
I’ve actually thought of a couple other improvements.
Better Genre/Tag Display and Usability
I think it’d be good to have these visible in more places and be easier to add.
For example, I’d love a way to see each tracks recording tags from the release page, maybe even a way to add them without having to go to each individual recording page. It’d be real handy for, for instance, a “Music From” soundtrack album, where all 20 or so tracks might be a different genre/subgenre.
In fact, it might even be nice to see what an artist’s recordings and releases are tagged as somewhere on the artist’s page while we’re at it.
Featured Releases/Entities
Yes, this is an idea from Wikipedia, but I really think it’d be a good addition to the homepage. I don’t know if it should be a “Featured for the Month” type of thing, or maybe just a random pick from a list of High Quality releases, (maybe after they’ve gone through some sort of nomination and/or voting process).
At the very least, having such a list easily accessible (and approved by several editors) could give newer or inexperienced editors a good example to follow, especially if we include other, possibly less used entities, like Events, Works, Places, and Series.
Better Collections
I feel there’s some missed potential here.
For one, default sort. Personally, while I’ve been going through my music folder tagging everything, I occasionally go to my “CDs I Own” collection, to add one in Picard. Once I get there though, I always sort by Album Artist. It is occasionally interesting to see them listed by year, but that feels like such a weird default to me…
Also, more views. I’d love to see my collections as a grid, with cover art and everything. Maybe you could even select a default view? Can’t think of any other good views at the moment…
Just a couple ideas I had while editing the last couple days…
I also forgot there was discussion about a mobile-compatible site, dark mode, larger fonts, and especially a dashboard, all of which I’d very much look forward to~
Thanks, @UltimateRiff, sounds great!
The first and the third points are really good and I feel we should definitely look into them soon.
Regarding the second point, I had a discussion with the team regarding this a while back and we came up with the conclusion that we shouldn’t come up with such a feature because that would become a certain criterion for displaying releases/entities which we do not want to appreciate since that could be unfair to other releases.
Just want to support people who suggest focusing the home page for the database user. For me one of the main things I do when I hit MusicBrainz is search. Making the search more prominent and having that workflow streamlined makes sense to me. Having another section to help point new users in the directions they want to go also makes sense to me. Such as “Get started editing >” or “Learn more about MusicBrainz >”.
And then I also like seeing the feed of recent edits and uploads. It doesn’t serve a particular utility but it is fun and seeing activity makes the community come to life for me.
i see that! there are some nice looking components in there!
really i was just drawn to how your design puts search front and center and felt like seeing how it could look on different devices
it got me thinking about search engines, and the ui pattern of having the search type selection (web/images/news/videos etc.) as “tabs” on the search result page
i was thinking that but for artists/releases/RGs/etc.could be cool
with a search engine style ux (super minimal homepage, basically just a search box and a minimal logo), we could really “show not tell” new users what musicbrainz is.
i guess i’m thinking
top bar (logo/log in/create drop down when logged in)
this is all kind of based on a recent mobile use case i had, looking up a recording to see different albums/compilations it was released on. the info is readily available on musicbrainz, but not something someone can find easily with traditional search engines
tl;dr - i think musicbrainz on mobile web should feel like a search engine
I figured this would be the best place to bring it up.
I think we need a better notification system. currently, (as far as I know), the only notifications we have are new notes on your own edits, server status, and post-edit confirmations (Thank you, your edit (#86506232) has been automatically accepted and applied).
there are, of course, email notifications for edits on subscribed entities, notes on edits you’ve added notes to, and whatnot, but those don’t show up at all on the website. the former does have a page you can visit, and the latter you can do an edit search to approximate this functionality.
a notification center would be an excellent addition, where you can see previous notifications, i.e. like most social media sites have.
also nice would be the ability to change notification settings per subscribed collection (and maybe by entity?), but that’s not a must…
Just a minor remark, on the currently shown example, the Other MetaBrainz Projects are listed with logos alternatively on left & right, it doesn’t make it easy to know to which project each description text belongs.
At least, an horizontal separator should be added:
