Posts Tagged ‘ui’

I love SoundHound. So please don’t think I’m picking on them or hating on their app. I’m not.

In fact, I think the folks who built it are evil geniuses who probably sold their collective souls to the devil to be able to magically identify just about any song from a few seconds of sound sent streaming over the wireless internet while traveling at 70 miles per hour down the freeway, or even standing still.

But I don’t like their social sharing interface. Truth be told, I don’t like the social sharing interface for most apps. They too often force their thinly veiled sales pitches into the messages, either by brute force, not giving users the option to edit, or by hoping we’ll be too lazy to delete their suggested messages.

“Just used #SoundHound to find…” is a waste of precious Twitter characters in my opinion. That fact will be obvious to anyone who clicks on the link, since it will take them to a SoundHound song sample. And their brand message is not the message I want to send. If I’m sharing a song I’ve just heard on the radio, for example, I’m doing it because I like it, and want to lead others to it.

Give me more control. What I’d really like is for app creators to give me some options in the application preferences. In the example to the right, let me set my own default prefix for the song, artist and link. Let me choose my own #hashtag if I want. And let that be my new default message format. It would be a simple enough change to make and I, for one, would use SoundHound more often if I didn’t have to take the extra time to select and delete their advertising copy on every use.

Pandora makes a similar mistake with their web service. I’m assuming they’d both like people to use the sharing features or they wouldn’t put them there. If I could set my own default message, or get rid of theirs, at a minimum, I would probably play a larger role in leading people to their services. But I can’t, so I don’t. I gotta believe I’m not alone here.

Give me control. Give me a choice. I’ll share more. How about you?