The New Last.fm: A Few Usability Remarks

I have been an avid user of Last.fm for almost 4 years now, from the days when it was still called Audioscrobbler. I love the site and it is definitely one of my most visited sites, mostly because of the fantastic friends I have acquired through the years. (Hi guys!)
For those of you who don’t know what last.fm used to look like or wants a trip down memory lane:

So, I have seen the site progressed a lot in the past 4 years and in general I am glad about the general direction it has taken. Today the latest version of the site launched, which I think is the 4th major redesign. So, being a usability kinda guy, I did a quick review of the site.

Consistency
Last.fm breaks one of the most important rules regarding usability and that is that they break consistency. Go to any artist page and you will notice that the “Events”, “Listeners”, “Groups”, “More Information”, “Email Newsletter” and “Recent Activity” headers are all identical. Yet, only the “Groups” and “Events” headers are clickable. This is curious, especially because the Listeners box have an option to “See more”.
Similarly, the “Top Albums”, “Shoutbox”, “Similar Artists” and “Videos” are all visually indistinguishable from each other and yet all of them, except the “Shoutbox” can be clicked.
Which one of these are clickable?

Hierarchy
Then there is the hierarchy of the video pages. When you are viewing a particular video of an artist, the focus of the hierarchy seems to be on the fact that I am on a video page. Shouldn’t it rather be the artist to which that video belongs? This is true for all the sections within an artist page. It feels like last.fm tried to merge page titles with breadcrumbs but they failed.

Where am I?
Another big mistake is the general indication of where I am within last.fm. The previous site did this quite well but on the renewed version has an identical top menu regardless of what pages you are on. And is it just my or was that search box squeezed in at the last minute?
Apart from the top menu not indicating where I am, when posting a new thread in a forum, nowhere is it indicated where I am.

Search
Search in general leaves a lot to desire. First of all, as mentioned, the search box feels a bit misplaced but more importantly, the results are hard to navigate. A search for The Knife gives us the band but it also lists all songs that The Knife has on last.fm. This means that if you are perhaps looking for the song Mack the Knife, you will be doing some serious searching through all the other The Knife songs before finding it.
Page sizes and side menu
A small annoyance is also the fact that he side menu seems to disappear on certain pages. While I understand that a side menu isn’t applicable to all pages, it seems strange that the Browse, Video, Listen and Events pages are without side menu whilst the Charts page has one. What’s more, the Event page is a different size than the rest. It doesn’t feel like an elegant solution although I must admit, this is a minor problem, if at all.
Useless eye candy
Whilst browsing by Posters on the event page is novel, it doesn’t really help me in picking an event.

Small input fields
Something that annoyed me from the start was the small input field for forum discussions. While I understand that the forums are not very high on the priority list of last.fm (which one of you can find the general discussion forum?), I do feel that the group forums are one of the core elements of last.fm and having such a small input field is not encouraging me to post. If there is a greasmonkey fix for this, let me know in the comments.

The group forum input box

Whilst on the topic of input, the three rows of buttons are slightly confusing, for instance: what is the difference between Video, Google Video and Youtube? Can’t this be merged into one?

Groups and Friends overview
These two pages are mostly the same although the group overview only shows 10 groups (without searching capabilities) whilst the friends overview page displays twice that amount. Finding a particular person or group is rather hard if you have to browse through loads of pages, showing only 10 or results per page.
The groups overview

In general however, I would like to applaud the last.fm team’s efforts. Most of these issues are easily fixed. I think the major problems are the fact that headers are inconsistent and also the fact that the menu items at the do not indicate in which section I am, making it harder to navigate through the site. Apart from that I am very excited about the brand new last.fm.
Best new feature? Definitely the library.