• Moved my interface images over to CloudFront, Amazon's new Content Delivery Network (CDN.) I'm especially hoping this will increase initial page view performance for my site in Europe and Asia, where I've always had some lag. I'll be monitoring my bounce rate to see if that's the case. The initial results are positive (an overall reduction of 1-2% in my bounce rate over the past week), but the numbers are still too small to really draw any conclusions.
• Took advantage of Firefox's Link Prefetching to speed up all those next gallery links. I tested it out and between link prefetching and all the caching I do, browsing gallery pages in Firefox 2+ is screaming fast.
• Added some copy and rewrote some of the text/labels right here on the blog. Spurred on by the blog chapter in Designing the Obvious, I decided to implement a couple of his recommendations. Within 20 minutes of having read the chapter, I'd changed the header for the comment section, added the little descriptive blurb below it and changed the label for my RSS icon from "FEED" to "Subscribe."

  Small changes all, but maybe they'll improve the experience for folks.

  Or maybe not.

  And if they don't? I'll try something else

This kind of ongoing enhancement is core to the way I approach web design/development. I often speak of sites as being living organisms and this is the kind of thing I do to keep mine growing/evolving in positive ways.

Fun times.

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.

For the period from 2008/05/03 to 2008/06/01 I averaged 4.79 pages per visit

For the period from 2008/04/03 to 2008/05/02 I averaged 4.38 pages per visit

Those numbers represent an increase of 9.37% or .41 pages per visit. I'm not going to make Google tremble, but I'll take it.

Check it out here.

I'm actually in the process of recoding all the gallery pages (with the exception of the alphabet I posted yesterday, which was built that way from the beginning) to have an actual anchor tag wrapped around the image. For now I'm doing it with a little bit of JavaScript:

var imgs = $("artimg").getElementsByTagName("img");
for (var i=0; i< imgs.length; i++) {
    imgs[0].onclick= function() {
        document.location.href=$("next").href;
    }
}

where "next" is the existing ID applied to the next link in gallery pages. I love being able to use such simple JavaScript to enhance the user experience in such a (potentially) large way.