Drinking from the Fire Hydrant

User interface changes should be improvements. The new iTunes Music Store isn’t an improvement.

The iTunes Music Store has become progressively more difficult to use with every release of iTunes. The latest set of changes replace the XML-driven native iTunes interface with HTML pages. This is probably a win for Apple, as it makes maintaining those pages a lot easier – and it means that most of the UI related to the Store in iTunes is handled by Webkit.

It’s not a win for users. If you launch the store and want to browse music by genre, you need to wade through a whole bunch of stuff before you find the links that will take you into the old browser-style interface, and the Explore options take you to further web pages that also don’t have genre-specific links. There’s a link for “recommendations for you”, but this page is full of music I don’t care about.

Compare the store with eMusic.com’s web storefront. It’s a winner. Browse and search are right at the top, so I can easily browse by genre. he content of the landing page is tailored to me, based on my past purchases. The recommendations are right there so I don’t have to wade through them.