See my comment above - it would require a significant effort to get off the ground, as the app without data would not be useful to first users, and without the data provided by those first users, it wouldn't be useful to others.
Thank you! I definitely considered doing something like that, however — the amount of work required to crowd source the data would be significant. There would be a “chicken & egg” problem — the app wouldn’t be useful to first users, and without the first users, there wouldn’t be enough data to make it useful for everyone else — so this would require a fairly large marketing campaign to get off the ground.
But — one day I may still do it :)
There's hardly a chicken & egg problem if you already had a bunch of happy users. Just display "no data available" on the first day, and have a banner in the app explaining the situation, and ask them to contribute today's data. You'll most certainly get a handful of users who want to help. After 3 or so days of this, the problem will be solved.
We make software to help police officers do their jobs more efficiently - our applications literally help save lives. There's a lot of interesting design challenges - for example, emergency dispatchers look at our CAD (computer aided dispatch) software for many hours on large monitors.. how do you design it so their eyes don't get tired?
And then cops look at the same software on their laptops, as they're driving to respond to an emergency.. how do you make a notification "suspect is armed" stand out so they notice it among all other data?
We are looking for designers to help us solve these and other problems:
Why do you call the position "product designer" when it is definitely asking for UX designers? I mean, when I think "product designer" I think industrial design, but this is clearly on the software side.
> Product design is sometimes confused with (and certainly overlaps with) industrial design, and has recently become a broad term inclusive of service, software, and physical product design. Industrial design is concerned with bringing artistic form and usability, usually associated with craft design and ergonomics, together in order to mass-produce goods.[4] Other aspects of product design include engineering design, particularly when matters of functionality or utility (e.g. problem-solving) are at issue, though such boundaries are not always clear.[5]
A digital product designer is basically a UX designer with knowledge of product management. While UX rely only on the user experience and the constraints of the user environment, the P.D. have to incorporate (and understand) business requests, production workflow, ect.
That really isn't different from what a UXD already does, and it definitely doesn't require any ID skills. You might want to cast your net for just plain old UXDs, rather than people who have been trained specifically in product design (if there is indeed a real specialty there, I doubt that's true).
I saw Mark43 a while ago and haven't been able to stop musing about it since - I think it would be rewarding work knowing if you excel at your job you're helping save lives and reduce risk!
I realize that these features are what you want, and sorry that they're not making you happy. But I would bet that a very small minority of users cares about things native clients / bundled browser and Hi-Fi option.
On the other hand, they added things like making discovering new music much easier, like "Daily Mixes" and "Discover Weekly", which - again, I don't have any hard data to back this up - made a ton of users very happy.
The first time I used daily mixes I was blown away by how perfect it was.
I use Spotify as much as conceivably possible (~20 hours per week) and haven't heard a peep of discontent from anybody. Totally agree - Spotify is incredible.
Yeah, I agree. The criticism above is definitely from an engineers perspective. The vast majority of users really won't even notice most of the items on that list. Reminds me of the episode of Silicon Valley where engineers absolutely love their product, but everyone else hates it because of the terrible UX.
Three things stick out on that list as things non-engineers care about.
Lyrics; people listen to music and then enjoy singing along. This little thing called karaoke supports a whole industry, for engineers and non-engineers alike, so people can get together and sing songs.
Redesigning the client. New interfaces are scary and different for non-engineers.
Can't add third party songs to cloud library. Non-engineers understand that some licensing nonsense means they can't get Taylor Swift on their Spotify, and then... just don't use Spotify, because all their music is on the Apple.
I'm not including "native client to bundled browser" as something non-engineers care about, but people do ask "why does the new version of $program make my laptop fans get all loud?"
Really? What genre of music do you listen to mostly? I enjoy hip hop / rap style music and the discover mixes are generally pretty awful. They seem to just throw in a bunch of popular radio hits and some b grade tracks from smaller artists. I've been really disappointed because people always talk about how great the discover feature is.
I have much better results playing a full album on youtube and letting youtubes auto play feature pick the next album for me. I've discovered a half dozen artists that way on the last year.
My daily mixes never flow correctly. I'll have a softer, technical indie track followed by a technical heavy metal song. It's bad enough that I can't use them at all.
My friends and I average over 20 hours a week as well and we're all pissed about their recent decisions.
The removal of messaging/direct sharing was the final straw for me.
Wait. They removed this feature? I unsubscribed over a year ago but this was one of the biggest things I missed after no longer having Spotify. What is the idea behind removing features? I do remember lyrics being removed and that was awful too.
I'm not sure if I use daily mixes but after years of being a Spotify user I recently
Started using some of their curated playlists for me. And am also blown away by how many new bands I'm being exposed to that seem good. Once I started telling friends about my curated playlist experiences they were mostly like yeah we know. So seems to be a feature that's widely liked.
I want Spotify to fix Discover Weekly. At some point Spotify learned I like Chinese and Korean songs, they started to add Thai songs. I don't listen to Thai and I don't understand Thai. I don't know how to make Spotify unlearn and remove Thai from Discover Weekly now. Ever since, I stopped using the Discover Weekly feature because I get 3-4 songs in languages I don't understand and there isn't an easy way to make Spotify realize I dislike a particular kind of song.
If there isn't a "I do not like this" feature for a machine learning feature, that UX isn't good. Other users have raise this concerns too (google it).
This is from a friend with a similar problem who talked to a guy working with the feature, so YMMV:
Supposedly, the feature works at least in part by analyzing your playlists and giving recommendations based on what the people with similar songs in their playlists have there as well. He claimed to be receiving less Finnish rap m after removing his playlists with northern Swedish rap, so you could try that approach if you still have any Chinese/Korean playlists.
I just remove the few offending songs from my discover weekly, which I don't find too much of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to learn from that.
They also ripped out messaging and the ability to share music directly after allowing it to die a slow death that involved it being completely hidden form the web client.
As a big fan of data analysis I've also noticed that they no longer accurately report or record user preferences and instead heavily weight popular artists.
They also only sent out the "Year in Review" to people that were subscribed to their spam emails.
Those two things are what brought me to them over Google Play Music. I'm currently in the process of switching back.
This is so frustrating hear. I'm going through the same thing right now as google music just wasn't doing the job for me and enjoyed my experience with Spotify much more.
As a non audiophile but someone who always chooses 320 Kbps perhaps more so for placebo than anything else, why do you not need hi-fi playback if you are an audiophile? Similarly, do you listen to Spotify or other music at 320 and notice a difference between that and 256 or 192? (Which I think are the other bitrates Spotify provides)
A core principle of lossy audio codecs is leaving out information that would be masked by other information. But the masking will only happen if that other information is actually reproduced as expected. If, e.g. through a lousy frequency response curve, the masking information is not as loud relative to the masked information as it should be, the difference between would-be-masked present (lossless source) and would-be-masked absent (lossy encoding) will be much more noticeable. Same for the masked information: if played back through a system that distorts the masked part into something that would not be masked, the distorted version will be missing from what you hear in the lossy version but present in the lossless on. Again a noticeable difference (and just because the audible difference lies in a distorted part does not mean that not hearing it would be better, the lossless version would be more consistenct with itself).
Better headphones make the illusions of the psychoacoustic models work better, much like a stage magician will be more convincing with more precise execution of his tricks.
Or in other words: if you are good at identifying the differences between lossy and lossless that might be because you have golden ears. But it could just as well be because you are using tinny cans. (Or any combination thereof)
What exactly do you do in real estate, if you don't mind me asking? Do you buy/renovate/sell, build from scratch, do you do residential/commercial, etc? And how did you get into it?
Buy, rehab, rent, refinance distressed residential property. I also manage two commercial properties.
I was born into it, but then didn't want to do it after college. I got back into it because I saw an opportunity that was too good to miss and I took it, now I'm hooked and expanding.
Some of the reasons I stayed away have changed. Just one example, paints used to be fairly heavily laden with VOCs and breathing that stuff is terrible for you for a number o reasons. Now zero/low-voc paint is really good and cheap. I wouldn't have wanted to paint an entire interior of a house with that stuff back then, now I am like Michaelangelo and the house I am working on is like my Sistine Chapel :)
We build software that literally helps save lives. Our clients are police departments, firefighters and EMTs.
Be a part of an awesome team in a fast-growing startup (featured on multiple "next startups to break out" lists). Learn more here: https://www.mark43.com/jobs/
