Welcome to understandings_; My column here on Maverick Revolution. I'll be postin' about advertising, the user experience, and pretty much anything in between or out... between? ;)

Last.fm launched their redesigned website a couple weeks back and I thought it would be helpful to people to compile a large assortment of screenshots from before and after and analyze some of the things they did which are a really great thing.

You can find almost 50mb of screenshots from before and after at the following URLs. However, there is a problem: The filenames are a hash of the URL rather than the URL itself, however they should all be in the same order in the gallery and have the same filename from before and after. My apologies for that.

Before - After

Some key points of their redesign seems to have been to compact the content in the page. Many pages which had the bar charts of how many times a song has been played, seen on the most popular pages for example, now have images of the artist or album rather than the bars. This leads to a cleaner page and helps to put emphasis on the artists rather than the listener.

The main page removes the "people listening now" element, the "upload your music" link for artists, almost all mention of artists uploading their music (its been shoved to the bottom), popular tags, all mention of AudioScrobbler, Hyped Tracks, and they even remove the explanation of what Last.fm was originally for. They did, however, add a charts link to the top, and replaced the "play now" box and description with a "right now" list of what is playing.

As I said earlier one thing that seems to have been a major goal was by compacting the pages. This is very evident in the "weekly free downloads" page. Instead of listing 200 tracks there are 50. The rest can be found via the tags, something that last.fm has had a hard time, I feel, pushing users towards using. The artist hype list on the left is also gone. It appears that something did not go right with their hype engine or whatever they were using so it has been scaled back. In fact, pretty much every sidebar on the left has been removed from the redesign lending to a cleaner design.

The find music/browse page has been totally revamped and by using larger images of artists it leads to a more "friendly" design. Again, the hype list from the left has been removed and instead is presented in the top center of the page alongside other artists. Instead of sorting artists by top videos, tracks, and artists, it is all presented as one. I assume it is a mixture of the artists videos and tracks combined to determine who is there but am unsure. One addition is the popular tags section in an attempt to make tags an essential part of Last.fm.

On the radio station/listen page the list of people listening has been cut down by half, and in general the page has been shrunk and compacted. While it looks cleaner, it does present less information about what the community is listening to. Last.fm is a social music website and they keep cutting the social out of it, what gives? Does it have anything to do with CBS acquiring them?

Finally the most important aspect of Last.fm: the profile page. Of course, I totally forgot about the profile when I captured the before and after screenshots so we will be relying on my memory for this section. One notable change is the rearranging or many boxes and addition of more Facebooklike information such as recent activity. Similar to how the homepage was changed artist images replace most of the bar charts. The addition of a users "library" shows their top artists of all time rather than a chart and does it really well. The new flash player of a users top tracks is a nice addition and shows that Last.fm hopes to increase their library of streaming and downloadable music as time continues. The artist pages are very similar in appearance now to user profiles also.

Well that's it. If you have any thoughts when looking through all those screenshots leave them in the comments below.