A letter to Zune Team about Favorites

Dear Zune Team,

In the current implementation, favorites are interesting but terribly annoying to set when using the Zune client for playback. (It’s at least 5 clicks & two waits from a song in Zune client… (1) right-click song, (2) click More About This Album, …wait…, (3) click More At Zune.net …wait for the browser to start & load the page (may have to log into Live ID)… find the song in the list again… (4) click the song in the album (may have to scroll), (5) click Fav. (6) close the browser window or tab if you didn’t want it.)

I don’t recall if it’s even possible to favorite on the Zune device… please let me know if it’s easier than that.

So, my guess is in the current implementation favorites are likely things users want to show to others on thier card, badly enough that they will go through the effort I described to do so, but that favorites are abandoned after some time by N% of users. (When they realize there is no benefit, and that effort is high, and they churn.) And I bet some users only have 1 or 2 favorites from accidental clicks in the Zune card.

The upside is that perhaps if setting favorites has a “cost”, they really are more meaningful than actual plays, for those users who go through the effort to set them regularly & lovingly. So then, perhaps they have value in matching like-users up. Limiting the # of favorites (as is already being done) has this effect too, although it kind of pissed me off when I discovered I’d clicked so many times, all except 5 (clicks) x 8 (favorites max) for naught. Now I’m likely to not be a customer of the Favorites feature anymore, and if you add a match-up feature, it won’t do me much good. See churn.

In summary, please just make it usable ((1) right-click the song, (2) click Make Favorite), tell your customers up-front what benefits, and downsides, it has

It’s just for fun… show your friends what your 8 favorite songs are! Maybe we’ll add a match-up feature later!

and see what happens.

Cordially (like the Cherry),

Wade