Categories
Apple, iPhone, Mac UI/UX

Apple Music improvements for iOS 11

Apple Music is a cool streaming service, which I have been enjoying for a while now. Even though the service is well done, the integration into the Music App on the iPhone could be improved. With WWDC 2017 and iOS 11 coming up, lets look at what could change.

Some of my major issues and ideas on how they could be improved are:

  • In case of a poor network connection I would like to play songs that are on my phone. Therefore: Show which songs are on the phone vs in the cloud. I don’t really need to know if I “own” the song vs or if it’s a cached “streamed” song.
  • The custom stations are great, but sometimes I would like to add the one song. Therefore: Allow songs to be added to Up Next while listening to a station.  Stopping the station, playing the song and then restarting the station provides a bad user experience and is also confusing. Since I can skip songs in the station it would be great to also allow insertion of songs.
  • Nowadays a good search is the goto than browsing through thousands of songs. Therefore: Instead of having the search in a separate tab, just put it everywhere as a global search. Such as putting it next to the title or as pull-down.
  • Some songs are not available for streaming but can be purchased. Therefore: When searching, also include songs that are only available for purchase. It would be very useful to know about available purchasable songs and would prevent users of having to switch to the iTunes Store and search again manually.
  • Make Up Next (or another feature) more prominent.
Design proposal for improvements of Apple Music in iOS 11
Design proposal for improvements of Apple Music in iOS 11

What do you think about my ideas and suggestions? What would you like to see improved in the next version of Apple Music?