Radial menus in Songza

Humanized have come out with another pretty good product, Songza. I won't use this post to review it in full, but as a summary it is a web-app to find and listen to music. It seems to have a minimalistic design philosophy - that is to say it aims to do only a small number of related tasks well.

What I would like very briefly to discuss is a specific implementation detail of the radial/pie menu's. Perhaps the most famous implementation is The Sims but there are many others. The interesting thing about Songza is that, unlike The Sims, you dismiss the menu by simply moving away from it. I've experienced this before but have found it far too fiddly as I kept unwittingly dismissing the menu, yet Sonza feels different.

This is attributed to the padding around actual menu items and, in other cases, a large target area. The clickable area of the menu items is large and there is a large amount of padding around the icon and text used. This means that, given the majority of users feel a need to click the very centre of an icon, there is a large distance between where they are trying to click and where dismisses the menu.

This isn't without it's limitations though. Having such a large and easy to click menu means that if you click the wrong song you must first move your mouse quite a way before you can move back to click the song below which the menu previously covered.