Written: 2007/11/26.

On the eve of the launch of remix.nin.com to the world, I am incredibly disappointed with the quality of the web design work on the site. It has fundamental design and usability flaws and is in need of a complete overhaul. Details below.

My background, a credibility statement for anyone reading this that doesn't know me:

I did the vast majority of the design (current version) and backend PHP coding (since the beginning) of NINRemixes.com and I am a professional web developer who's been in the field for over ten years. My career has seen the whole range of scope. I've worked by myself, I've worked for schools, I've worked for startups, I've volunteered on projects, and I've worked for large corporations such as Yahoo! and Google. I know dozens of people in the field and they all agree with the criticisms I've made here. (More sources can be cited if requested, if credibility is not enough.)

Design problems:

• Overall, the site is extremely low contrast, which makes it hard to read.
• Bright text on a dark background is also harder to read than the opposite. (sources: http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/survreslts.html, http://www.sitepoint.com/print/colour-checklists-web-design, http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/agecontrast.html)
• The fonts are tiny, making the site hard to read.
• The site's size does not scale. It's constrained to a box of fixed size which is either too big or too small depending on your screen size, but almost never "just right" - a better site would fit itself to your viewport at least vertically (you know, like most websites), if not horizontally too, ideally.
• Inline mp3 player uses twice-over transcoded mp3s - a waste of disk space (two copies of the same song) and significantly degrades the song quality. Transcoding an already lossy format to a lossy format significantly reduces quality.
• The scrolling text in the inline mp3 player is unnecessary and detracts from readability - this isn't Winamp.
• Permalinks autoplay remixes. Automatic play of music on any website, even a music site is a huge faux pas. Statistically, users predominantly hate it. This is not MySpace. (In fairness, YouTube does this too. And it's pretty annoying there as well.)
• The site should not have been based almost entirely on Flash. See next section.

Flash specific problems:

This site is a textbook example of why Flash sites suck. It has nearly all the symptoms of Flash misuse.

• Interface is vague, unintuitive, much of its capabilities are not easily discoverable primarily as a consequence of defying virtually all common web interface conventions, since it's completely custom from the ground up using Flash. For example, the skinned fake scrollbars do not look or behave at all like real ones. (more info on web standards and Flash here: http://www.macopinion.com/index.php/site/more/top_ten_reasons_why_flash_sucks/)
• Does not work on the vast majority of mobile devices since they generally don't support Flash.
• Does not work on Linux Firefox because of poor Flash support.
• Does not work on any computer where Flash is not installed.
• Back/forward functionality not respected because it's a Flash site.
• Cannot open links/sections into new tabs or windows because it's a Flash site.
• Browser's "Find" command doesn't work because it's a Flash site.
• Can't bookmark specific sections because it's Flash.
• Much of the text can't be copy/pasted because of heavy use of Flash and images in place of what should be actual text.
• Site content is not search engine optimized because search engines do not index Flash content.
• And now for the greatest irony of all, a site all about open source music created with Flash: a proprietary development environment hated by the open source community and professional web development community near universally. All you need do is do a Google or Yahoo! search for "why flash sucks" to see how passionately most professional web developers hate (the misuse of) Flash.

As a side note, one thing I do really like is the Attributes feature. It's an interesting experiment. It's like ninremixes' Tags, but more focused. That, and the associated sorting capabilities as a consequence are pretty nifty. :)

Conclusions:

First, It simply doesn't make any sense to duplicate the efforts of ninremixes.com, which has all the same features, has been around longer, has an existing community of users, and has a more clean, readable, accessible, scalable, polished, and overall usable design. The launch of a near functionally identical site will divide the community no matter how much integration is done.

The obvious solution is to have only one site: NIN's site. I maintain no fantasies of Trent not controlling the One True Remix Site, but our work on ninremixes.com is both time tested and superior to what NIN's ponied up so far, as I've previously indicated. Frankly, we've busted our asses for the last three years developing a rock solid site that at its very core has essentially been a gift to NIN for free, in exchange for their gift of multitrack sources to the community.

Since we've been doing it for them all along, it makes sense that our work should have been the basis of remix.nin.com. Why should they have wasted time and effort duplicating our efforts? It would have been far easier to transform the existing codebase of ninremixes into whatever Trent's "vision" is and I'd have been more than happy to volunteer my time doing it for him for free, just as Chris and I have been doing it on our own for over three years.

And I'm not kidding here. If Trent had taken the time to ask us, I personally would have preferred, assuming Chris agreed, to cede the entire ninremixes.com domain, source code, and mysql database to NIN in exchange for being able to continue my current role as a primary developer of the website. I write code and design usable interfaces for a living. I would have been (and still am) more than happy to transform whatever Trent's "vision" is into a clean, scalable, polished, usable web application in my spare time, for free, as I have already been doing for over three years.

Bottom line:

In a perfect world, there would be a One True Remix Site based on ninremixes.com (or at least a beaten-into-submission version of remix.nin.com, which I'd gladly volunteer my time coding for as well) run by Trent Reznor, his "vision" turned into a sexy, usable web application by a team of developers consisting of the former ninremixes.com staff and anyone else Trent considers trustworthy. I would very much like this perfect world to be a reality some day. It will be a glorious day when ninremixes.com redirects to remix.nin.com and I'm satisfied that the user experience is guaranteed a good one.