Digital Jay review

Digital Jay website

Screenshot of Digital Jay website
www.digitaljay.com Site up since..? Who knows.

Digital Jay is the first full Flash site I came across. It's interesting to see how these sites quickly drift into a certain genre; the Top 10 list on Digital Jay is all house, although there are many labels of all genres represented on the site.

I can only wonder how this can slip through from the people who make these sites as help is an essential part of an e-commerce site and again it is not evident anywhere on Digital Jay. People want to know what they get for their money and how they can pay for it. On my first visit I could not extract any of this information from Digital Jay.

Format Quality Price
? ? $0.99, $1.49 or $1.99. Who knows?

I keep on whining about bad usability. That's only because people don't understand that no matter how much a site is marketed, usability can make or break a site.

Boo.com is the schoolbook example of blowing $200 million on bad usability. Here's a short note on Boo.com by Jakob Nielsen. And a longer one, Remember Boo.

Previews are initiated either by clicking on the name of a track, on a headphone icon or a button labeled Listen. It's bad enough to use many different buttons for a single action, but in Digital Jay those buttons are not even always there. The preview player is a Macromedia media player component which is big, has a good draggable position slider and a volume control. I have no idea though why the Next and Previous buttons are there as they don't do anything. Preview audio quality could be better and you can't add the playing track to your basket directly from the player. There are other usability problems on Digital Jay as well, mostly because of Flash and the Macromedia components mentioned above.

Digital Jay works, but without registration you're left wondering what you'll get and how. If I dare to register one day, I'll post my experiences here.