eMusic, the cheaper (by a factor of four or five) and DRM-free alternative to iTunes that I use recently redesigned parts of their site. The biggest change came on the album pages, which now truly focus on the album. A prominent rating, track listing and album cover now dominate the screen. The former design had much less focus on the album itself and instead featured other site features, none of which I actually used.

Here's a sample (and a heck of a record, by the way)

So far, so good.

One thing they didn't redesign is the login page. Here it is:

Take a look, if you will, at the default configuration. Being a member (and lazy) my email and password are saved. Which is just the way I like it. What I don't like is the fact that the "Do you have an eMusic password?" question is there in the first place, and then it defaults to "No, I need to create a profile."

There are two things about that design which drive me batty. Depending on how attentive I am I'm annoyed by one of these two things:

1. If I notice/remember the radio button I get annoyed. Why? I'm a registered user. I've been an eMusic customer for years. I shouldn't have to answer the "Do you have an eMusic password?" all the time. Seriously. Slap a cookie on my machine and use it to give me a simplified login. Stop asking the question. All it does is slow me down. Just let me in to download some tunes…
2. On the other hand, if I'm on auto-pilot and I forget to check the "Yes I have a password" I error out. Since practically every other site on the net is just login + password + submit*, this happens way too often. It drives me nuts.

I've done this long enough and have actually seen this argument raised, so I can imagine the logic that went into this approach. Some "hands on" exec or inexperienced user experience designer said, in a meeting, "What if a new user lands on this page? We've got to have a mechanism to allow them to register." A worthy idea indeed and one that is standard all over the Net. The problem is, they designed the page around that idea and not around the actual purpose of the page- logging in. In effect it's the first page of a registration flow that just happens to have login functionality as well. Which is backwards since you register only once and then sign into the system many times. Optimizing this page for a single use, "what if?" scenario has consistently frustrated me.

Hopefully there's a new login page in the queue for this redesign and soon I'll have one less frustration on the web.

A man can dream, right?

*Amazon actually uses a similar pattern, but they default to "Yes, I have a password" which solves the issue I have with eMusic.