towerofnix
commented
1 year ago It should go without saying but the previous/next links will go to the respective album's gallery page (if extant), of course.
There's room to debate if these previous/next links in particular should skip albums that don't have a gallery page (because none of the album's tracks have any unique artwork). If we don't skip them, then we have to link to the info page. It's technically information you might want to know, but I think it could be too much of a distraction and inconvenience, because you'd probably subconsciously expect these links to always bring you to the next or previous gallery. Worse, that nav bar isn't going to be present at all on the info page (when on a wide screen), which means you don't even have a familiar way to navigate to the next/prev album — you have to realize you've gotta use the info boxes this time, and then click on the "Gallery" (in nav) or "View gallery page!" (in content) links to get back to the following album's gallery. It seems like a big inconvenience, and just skipping albums without galleries would sidestep the issue entirely, but I don't know how others will feel about "lying" about the group's chronology in this particular instance. (Albums without galleries are uncommon, but not exceedingly rare.)
Group links will probably be to their galleries, as well. I'm not sure there's any real value in linking to the info page here, especially since it would make the group and album (prev/next) links within the very same navigation element inconsistent.
There's going to be a slight incongruency here because following prev/next links will bring to album galleries, but clicking actual grid items in the group gallery will bring to album info pages... but I think that's an acceptable trade-off for the increased navigability. Group galleries are essentially HSMusic's version of Bandcamp artist/group "index" or "album grid" pages, and are a major part of how you explore albums - so I don't want group galleries to link to album galleries instead of album info pages.
(It's technically possible to perform client-side magic, detecting that you started navigating from an album gallery, and accordingly adjusting grid items to link to album galleries instead of info pages. But it feels a little too unpredictable - for the user - so I don't think that in particular is worth pursuing. Grid items just always linking to info pages feels more important to reinforce, and not conditionally - i.e, as far as the user is concerned, magically - betray.)
The album gallery page doesn't have navigation elements afforded to the album info page, namely the sidebar, which includes a track list (collapsed by default) and "info boxes" for each group the album belongs to. The track list would be redundant since the gallery is functionally an ultra-expanded track list by its nature, but navigation within or to groups is lacking here. It would be nice to be able to access those navigation links on the album gallery page, without intruding on the space and visual focus the track artworks are meant to take here. (Thanks to Makin for the comment about lacking navigation on this page.)
A possible solution would be to reuse the "secondary nav" element, which is intended to substitute the functionality of the sidebar when there isn't enough screen width available to show it. See an example below:
It's currently only used for relatively thin screens (e.g. tablets in portrait mode, phones), but since it's built to stand in when the sidebar is unavailable, it feels like it would fit pretty naturally in here on a gallery page — regardless the screen width. (The gallery page's secondary nav would have the same contents as the info page, i.e. just the group names and previous/next links.)