Previews: Making Browsing Less Painful

So I've been doing a lot of work on previews. You know, when you are digging around for just the right image, search lisitng or in my case, a sound loop. Overall, I found quite a few different solutions people decided to show their libraries of music however some definitely worked better than others.

The task of browsing multiple results is a daunting task, anything we as designers can do to make it less painful. I don't say more enjoyable because frankly, unless you're window shopping, it's always going to be painful.

The images below contain my analysis. Click on them for a larger version.






So here are some of my thoughts:

1) Make it fast, time is precious.
a) Reduce bounce or pogo-sticking, the back and forth between pages
b) stream content rather than do a pre-load

2) Even work-a-holics don't like this kind of work. Make it so they have to do as little work as possible (making a user move a mouse a lot or click a lot over a long period of time induces suicidal thoughts.

3) Keep everything together. Don't make users have to look at multiple windows or away from where they are focusing on. It might confuse them or more importantly, annoy them. They have to save those looks for incoming IM chats.

4) Easy on the eyes OK? For gosh sakes, they are going to be staring at this page for a long time. Make it comfortable to look at. Soft colors, nothing too stark.

Cheers,
JT