Volume 17, Number 2

AThe Impact of Album Layout on User Experience in Smartphone Music Applications

  Authors

Molly Scott and Damian Schofield, State University of New York, USA

  Abstract

The study addresses a significant issue in User Interface (UI) design for smartphone music applications, focusing on the usability impacts of grid-based versus list-based album layouts. Music apps are widely used as smartphones have become central to entertainment consumption. Despite their prevalence, little research has explored how different UI layouts impact user experience in music apps, especially in terms of efficiency, perception, and usability. This gap in knowledge makes the study vital, as optimizing UI layouts can improve the functionality, user satisfaction, and accessibility of music applications, which are integral to millions of users' daily lives.This work addresses this variation by exploring how each layout affects different usability considerations within a music app context, such as the time taken to find a desired album, user error rates, and users’ qualitative perceptions of the app. A custom music app interface was created and used for the user testing undertaken in this study. The website guided participants through two usability tests in a simulated music app and automatically collected survey responses and quantitative metrics. This study did not find evidence to support a significant difference in the time it took participants to find a desired album between the two layouts. However, the experimental participants believed that they could find a desired album quickly when using a grid-based layout than when using a list-based layout.

  Keywords

Music Applications, information Search, Smartphone Applications,User Testing, User Interface, Usability