Critique of musepy.me for phase 4
What did they do well?
The Requiem For Our Dreams team has done a great job at addressing all of our user issues, making the website more user-friendly without sacrificing the clean and polished look of the website. Adding the option to filter songs and albums by genre makes it easier to explore items that are relevant to the user's interest, and the website is quick and responsive to adjusting filters and sorting options. They have also made the URL on each model grid page display any filter or sort options applied in a human-readable format, allowing for easy sharing of results with other people. Overall, MusePy includes nearly any function that an average user would want from their website and presents them in a visually appealing and seemingly effortless manner.
What did we learn from their api / website?
While style plays a large role, MusePy also feels like a cohesive website due to how well-connected all of their models are. The connections are intuitive, and each model instance page includes any links to other model pages that a user would be interested in. External links, such as embedded Spotify playlists and Google maps, are also deeply connected to their respective models and are incorporated seamlessly. A website is only as good as its core concept, and MusePy serves as a lesson in making sure to choose a concept from the get-go that makes sense and feels cohesive without the need for explanation.
What can they do better?
The size of the text dramatically scales down with the size of the viewport, so the text is incredibly small when viewed on mobile or on a small browser window. It borders on being illegible when there are a lot of elements on the page. Additionally, while the website overall looks great, there is some strange formatting for various models. For example, on instances of artists, the list of popular songs is positioned strangely relative to the list of upcoming concerts, resulting in a large expanse of empty white space. Adjusting the formatting and making the website more responsive to different viewport sizes would greatly improve the website.
What puzzles us about their api / website?
Currently, navigating to a city page briefly results in a scary error message before correctly displaying the page. This wouldn't mean much to an average user and makes the website appear unusually sketchy in comparison to how professional the rest of the website is. Additionally, while the inclusion of an error message for invalid pages is great, for model grid pages, pagination is still displayed on error pages as clickable links. It's rather confusing, especially with some links working but not all, and it'd probably be best to remove the pagination links entirely from error pages.