E-Jukebox Failure

So I'm not sure if everybody has heard about this, but there's a fancy new-fangled thing down in the Hive that they've been tooting their horns about this year; an Electronic Jukebox, which is hooked up to the internet so you can go and download any song you want when you want it, just in case it isn't already on the machine.

Also, it boasts a feature of changing the cost/value of each song according to how often it's played, meaning the more a song is requested the less it'll cost. This is all well and good, but these are features that supercede the functionality.

The controls were fairly intuitive; it was all by touchscreen, which is sort of cool. Before touching the screen, it would scroll with all sorts of advertisements or instructions on how to use the system, which was helpful to read. Basically, you were given a screen displaying 6-8 album covers, in alphabetical order. There was an A-Z list at the bottom, that you could jump to different letters with by touching that letter. If you just wanted to scroll through the actual artists of whichever letter you were on, there were arrows on each side of the middle section with the albums to let you scroll.

If you were wondering if they had a song/album, there was a Search function that would look things up real-time as you searched. I don't recall if the on-screen keyboard used to punch in the letters was a QWERTY keyboard or not, but it didn't strike me as confusing/difficult to use. They also had a "Hot Picks" (or something like that) option, which listed the top X amount of songs recently played. Sadly, there was only one song on the list (Wonderwall, by Oasis), so obviously this thing never gets used.

It's a pretty cool idea, and it's got a fairly good design, but it's just poor placement/execution by the school. For one, almost everything on this campus is driven by our ID cards, so I had assumed there would be a card-swipe for our Flex account, which I discovered was not true when I first approached the machine. I had to go back to my room, get 4 quarters, and then come back. The second issue is that it never tells you when it's appropriate to enter the money. I never got to listen to my song, because as I was browsing, I decided arbitrarily it might be a good idea to insert coins before I tried to play a song (much like you put coins into an arcade game before you can play), and apparently the machine didn't recognize them. Which means no music for me.

It's not a terrible interface, but there are a few key points that were missed in the design/placement/execution of this machine, and sadly, those points are somewhat fatal, as evidenced by the utter lack of use/my failure to get music out of a jukebox.

Cheers,

-Brad