Why users can't find the right track in your catalog

We've written before about the core UX principles behind music search. In this follow-up, we sat down with Omri, our Product Manager, and Evgeny, our Product Designer, to go through the common UX patterns that keep users from finding a track fast.

Most of these issues stem from trying to adjust user behavior to the product, and not the other way around.

We've been working on music search tech for a long time, and we've hit most of these patterns ourselves. Think of it as the stuff we wish someone had told us three redesigns ago.

The extra step

Some products ask a question before the search even starts: which kind of search do you want? Never in those words, but that's the ask. Pick the mode, then type.

The logic is easy to follow. The existing search works, people know it, and nobody wants to break it. Adding a mode beside it feels safe.

The cost lands on the user. They have to know the choice is there, remember to make it, and judge in the moment whether it's worth the extra step. Most won't. They'll type into the box that's already in front of them, the way they always have.

Good search works out what someone is after and returns the best result it can, with no mode to switch on. Understanding intent is the product's job, not the job of the person typing.

The blank box

Give someone an empty search bar and no idea what to put in it, and they fall back on what they know. For most music professionals, especially working in sync, that's one or two keywords. It's what search bars have wanted from them for twenty years.

That habit is worth understanding before you try to change it. Industry search fields have always been small, built to take a genre and a mood. So people carry a keyword-sized expectation to every box they meet. Give them a field that could take a whole brief, but keep it small and empty, and they'll still type "upbeat pop."

The blank state does more work than you’d think. An empty box tells them to type a couple of words. Seed it with a few real examples and it tells them something else: paste a brief, drop a reference link, describe the scene. Make the field big enough to invite a sentence, and put it where no one can miss it.

The forced menu

A lot of search design starts from the catalog's own structure. Genre, then subgenre, then mood, then tempo. It's tidy, it mirrors how the catalog is organized, and it makes sense to the people who built it.

It makes much less sense to the person searching. A user arrives with a brief: references, links, a scene, a few different uses, a feeling they're chasing. Faced with a genre menu, they do the only thing they can: boil all of that down to one or two keywords that seem safe to start with and carry the rest in their head.

That compression is where good matches die. The detail that would have surfaced the perfect track gets dropped because there was nowhere to put it.

Ask what someone is working on. Let them paste the brief, the reference track, the description in plain language. Then make sense of it.

The mistimed onboarding

When a team ships a feature they're proud of, the instinct is to tell everyone right away. The homepage becomes an ad for it. A how-to email goes out. A tour pops up at the next login, walking people through a tool they haven't asked about.

It reaches them at the wrong time. Someone in the middle of a search isn't looking to learn a feature they don't need that second. The announcement lands, they note that the thing exists, and they move on. Later, when it would help, nothing points them back.

It works better in reverse. Teach a capability at the moment it becomes useful, in the place where it pays off. Someone who just found a track they like is ready to learn how to find more music like it. 

A mode to pick, an empty box, a genre tree. Different problems, same request: learn our structure, our vocabulary, our schedule.

The teams that get it right start from the other end. They watch how people already search, where they hesitate, what they're actually trying to do, and build around that.

If any of this sounds familiar and you're working on your own search experience, we're always up for a chat.