It's not very hard to see that Apple is the best at creating user interfaces. I've started using Amazon's MP3 Store and if you're a fan of DRM free music (and who isn't?) you should start using it too. The only problem is the interface to the store is simply awful. I've gotten so familiar with Apple's iTunes interface it's difficult to swallow a system where I can't see the most popular songs from an album or sort by most downloads or have any sort of interactive auto-complete search feature. When you go to check out for some reason Amazon's "One-Click" (tm) actually takes four clicks from the time I decide I want a song. After clicking four times for "one-click" the downloader pops-up to actually start the download process. The whole system needs to be put in the trash and Amazon's developer's should start over. The whole system feels very hackish and leaves a lot to be desired.
What can Amazon do? First, look at what Apple's done then try to achieve something similar but as a web solution. Retool the "MP3 Downloader" application to be a hidden plugin (similar to the Google gear's interface) where the web app. would communicate with the downloader portion via a javascript interface. This would make the whole interface seem more consistent (even though the plugin would still be required).
Apply lots of ajax magic to the page so that when I start typing "radi" I get "Radiohead" and a list of 5 other similar band and song names. Lists of songs should also be fast to load and NOT require the whole page to be (re)loaded. Make the song pagination system snappier so that browsing through songs feels snappier.
DRM-free music is worth the extra effort to go through the amazon system and as a new system goes it's not too bad but there is definitely quite a bit of room for improvement.
