Fixing dashboard to be ready for artists

@developers I’ve brainstormed info here about known Dashboard bugs, UX trickiness, and design tweaks I think we should work discuss and implement before making the Dashboard available for self-upload by artists. Next week, I’ll be going back through these notes, aiming to reorganize/simplify them and create figma docs which lay out the key changes. Until then, any feedback, questions, observations are great! Let’s get this thing live!

Need UX consistency

Need consistent design distinction between entry fields, navigation buttons, and confirmation/action buttons.

No interface for Musician role

When logging in with Musician WP role, there is no interface or user menu. Consequently, one is also unable to log out. I understand this is intentional to keep these folks unable to use the Dashboard for now.

Unsuccessful logins

Log in does not work consistently. I sometimes have to try two times to be let in.

Lingering data

When returning to Create New Release page after uploading a release, the page will display the previous’ release’s information filled out. The browser must be refreshed to remove this information; if fields are deleted manually, it does not work.

Missing processes

User needs a way to request assigning a release to a label.

User needs a way to request reassignment of track or release ownership to another user.

User needs way to notify admin that their release is ready to be published (or approved for autopublishing upon scheduled release date.

Questions

Are users going to be able to delete their own releases, or merely hide them? Needs to be contemplated due to how stream2own is designed. I’d err on the side of artist freedom. A listener needs to retain access to tracks in their Collection.

Is there a “download” checkbox in the Musician interface?

New release / Edit release page

Release date

Release date boxes need to be changed to calendar select option. Another good option would be number entry for DD and YYYY, yet Month is a dropdown select. minimum, they need to be reordered to YYYY, MM, DD.

Artwork

Artwork upload tool needs to be tested. Recommended guidelines are:

  • Album artwork: 1:1 JPEG, JPG, or PNG format with minimum dimensions of 1400x1400 pixels. Maximum dimensions are 3000x3000 pixels. Maximum file size is 5 MB.
  • We need to accept 1400 caus Bandcamp does
  • Bandcamp allows up to 10MB. If we accept this, we should autoscale down to 5MB for faster loading on our site.
  • Bandcamp allows .jpg, .gif, or .png

Hover text on Upload Artwork button incorectly reads “Drop an Audio File”

After uploading artwork, a pop-up states: “New upload ready”. This behavior is independent of completing other fields on the page. I believe it is simply informing the user that the artwork has been successfully uploaded, not that the release itself is ready to be confirmed and receive uploaded music, which the message misleadingly implies.

  • Reword popup to “Artwork uploaded”, or remove popup entirely, since it is clear from the artwork displayed that the image has been successfully uploaded into the system.

About

About field can accommodate up to 50,000 characters. This info needs to be in the description for the field. This field needs to be redesigned to be more clearly resizable. More importantly, this field currently cannot accommodate paragraph/line breaks. Adding this ability is essential.

About field is also “Optional” and needs to be labeled as such.

About category is called “Story” on Release page; need to find a common term

Genres

This needs to be renamed as “Tags” and presented as being beyond genre in purpose. Ideally, it would autoformat all information entered as hashtags: #indieelectronic #hiphop since this is how the information appears and functions on the player.

Saved incompatible text

Currently, the genres, composers, and performers fields will remember entries made from previous releases submitted. The problem is that it presents these as items separated by commas, a format which if selected by the user does not recognized the items as separate if confirmed.

Until we redesign these entry fields, we should ensure that the page won’t autofill or suggest previous entries.

Composers/Performers

We need to do some reflection on these fields’ purpose relative to future metadata fields we don’t currently offer.

Error notifications

“New upload ready” notification appears after filling out Album artist, Release title, and Artwork – in that order. This is misleading because the form page also requires, at minimum, that the Release date be completed. I advise that this notification be removed.

The “Something went wrong” notification should be at bottom of page, just above “Continue button”. Since it is at the top of the page, it is not noticable.

Legal prompts need to be reworded/expanded

Continue

The grayed out or active appearance of the “Continue” button seems to have no relation to whether all required fields have been completed.

On release page

  • Change button text: “Add existing tracks” → “Add uploaded tracks”; these buttons should also be moved just underneath the header “Tracklist”, rather than appearing below the tracks. “Update metadata” button needs to be moved to this same location and renamed “Edit tracks info”
  • Rename button: “Upload more tracks” → “Upload new tracks”
  • Enlarge text: “Settings” should be same size as “Tracklist”
  • Change text: “Update” at top of page → “Edit release info”
  • Change text: “Tracklist” to “Tracks” (?)
  • Change text: “Release year” to “Release date”; add month and day to year
  • Remove link: “Create new release” at top of page
  • Change text: “Display artist” → “Release artist”

Add existing tracks

The “Add existing tracks” button is not usable at all times, seemingly due to a bug. It must be always usable, even if the user has no tracks uploaded. If the user has no tracks previously uploaded, then the popup can simply state what it is there for and that “You have not uploaded any tracks yet”.

Quality of life; avoiding problems

Each track uploaded needs to display a signifier the user can use to identify it in the absence of a title. Options: track length, track id number – each have advantages. Especially important because I don’t think there is currently a way to delete a track you have previously uploaded.

When you click the X next to a track, this removes it from the release. There should be a notification that "The track has been removed from the release but has not been deleted. Your uploaded tracks can be found on the Uploaded tracks page.

“Add tracks to…” Page

Title should be renamed → “Upload tracks to…”

On Linux/Brave, unable to upload AIFF files

On Mac/Safari, unable to upload WAV
https://github.com/resonatecoop/uploader/issues/9

Note “drop your audio files here” is not accurate. When one attempts to drop audio files, it only works if they are dragged/dropped exactly onto the button. The larger colored box is not a valid drop zone.

“Update metadata” button needs to be moved to Tracks area of Release Page. It is confusing that it is hidden on this page.

Tracks can now be uploaded in bulk, which is excellent. There needs to be a note to the user to doublecheck track order after upload.

Is this “30 tracks” note accurate? Why is this here?

misspelled: “if your” → “if you”

Update metadata page

This page should be renamed “Edit tracks info”. This page is also where you can control payment settings on tracks so calling it strictly a “metadata” page is misleading.

This page is not carrying over info originally entered on the Release Info page.

“Update metadata” - UI/UX, this button is not a confirmation button, it is a navigation button. Our navigation button and confirmation buttons need different designs and titles.

The word “Update” as a navigation prompt needs to be replaced by “Edit”; otherwise it can seem to be a confirmation button.

Since [PAID] is not automatically checked on this page, users need to be clearly steered and instructed how to set their monetization setting to paid BEFORE requesting their release be published.

Change ownership

This functionality needs to be reworked. Not sure the right solution. It is a privacy concern that a user can look up any user’s name and discover their email address although it is quite possible that this is an Admin-only feature (I am using an Admin account). At this point in our development, if an artist or label wants to change track ownership, they should have to contact Resonate to request it and an admin can do it manually after confirming with the intended receiver of the ownership.

User Menu

Change “Tracks” to “Uploaded tracks”

ISRC

I know we’ll have the ability to expand our metadata fields after the Tracks API is worked on. It would be great to be able to collect these codes before then. However, if other platforms don’t require it, we could ignore it for now.

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@Hakanto can you put all the “rename” or help text stuff together? (or big uggo tag like [TEXT EDIT ONLY])

linking https://community.resonate.is/t/notes-app-musings-proposals-for-resonate-community-to-consider-from-a-label-perspective/

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Dumb question, is what I’m seeing as an uploader, the artist dashboard? If so… Just adding to @Hakanto 's excellent and thorough list.

When I first log in (or authorize if I’ve stayed logged in), if I navigate to ‘releases’, it comes back ‘no results to display’.

If I navigate to ‘Dashboard’ and click ‘Create new release’, I get a 404.

If I go Dashboard, then Releases, releases show and create new release button works.

Also, when dragging multiple tracks to the ‘drop your audio files here’ button, it can be quite slow to register any uploading has actually begun. This is smoother for one or two tracks at a time. If this could be a little more responsive, giving immediate feedback that uploading has started, it would be better.

Finally, and this might be indicated elsewhere, what license is my music uploaded with? Can I add e.g., CC license and should this be available via uploading/dashboard (perhaps this is more of a future roadmap thing though).

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Thank you Hakanto for all the work you have done to get this site running. Related to artist page, I am having trouble editing my profile. I can log in, and see my artist page, but I can not edit it. Either that or I have lost the sauce on how to log in as an artist.

Brian Higgins

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This seems much more responsive recently, has there been an update?

@brianhiggins replied via email :+1:t4:

@thehouseorgan thanks as always for your upload work! Yeah, there have been some updates lately, thanks to @boopboop and others! :fist:t4:

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I’m just collecting a few observations/fixes which spun off of an issue I noted here Uploading music submissions - #14 by thehouseorgan

  1. On the upload page, after creating a release, underneath each uploaded file/title, it would help to also show the filename. This is especially useful if/where bad embedded metadata is extracted for the track title and an uploader needs to cross-reference against the filename. See also Uploading music submissions - #16 by CPacaud

  2. It’s been noted that the uploader expects MM DD YYYY whereas the metadata spreadsheet asks for YYYY-MM-DD. It would be better if the dashboard upload page was updated to YYYY MM DD to avoid confusion. See also Uploading music submissions - #18 by thehouseorgan

  3. All of the (currently) unused track fields when updating track info make it hard to see that all tracks are correctly set to ‘paid’ when uploading releases. There are suggestions to collapse the unused fields (Uploading music submissions - #17 by CPacaud) or to have a ‘set all tracks to paid’ button to the release page (Uploading music submissions - #19 by remst8).

Thanks!

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