July

An employee at All Music Guide just e-mailed me with a response to the nearly-universal criticism of their redesign. I pasted the entire text below. (The entire e-mail was just posted to their homepage. It’s gone now.) Feel free to debate in the comments.

Update: In response to the complaints, AMG is slowly fixing some of the more heinous rendering bugs with non-IE browsers. (On-hover link cursors and tabular data are mostly working, and the giant banner is gone.) If you want to use the old site, use the old IP address (for now). (It now goes to Allmovies.com.)

July 15, 2004: The site’s faster (though I’m still getting periodic timeout errors and slowdowns), and many of the worst rendering errors have been fixed (though a couple remain). They’re working out the little kinks and I appreciate the effort, even if it doesn’t address my larger complaints about the site.

Also of interest: In two hours, Tim Murtaugh was able to create a standards-compliant cross-browser version of the AMG homepage, proving that it doesn’t take a large company to make a website that works for everyone.

July 18, 2004: Jeff Veen wrote some interesting thoughts about websites working in conflict with user goals, using the All Music Guide redesign as a striking example of users routing around damage. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

July 20, 2004: Adrian Holovaty wrote All Music Guide Corrector, a wonderful Firefox extension that seamlessly fixes many of the three of the site’s biggest usability issues: the Javascript links, Flash spinner, and partial artist/album reviews.

August 24, 2004: All Music Guide responds again with an update about more recent changes to the site.

GENERAL COMMENTS
We’ve been on the net since 1995 providing a free music reference resource. We would hope that we’ve earned a little patience from our users as we work through the transition to the new site and some of the difficulties we’re experiencing. We’re a small company with small company resources. While we’re flattered by our users’ expectations, we are not Amazon or Yahoo! We’re a small company from Ann Arbor, MI, trying to provide a great resource for music fans.

SLOW RESPONSE TIMES
We are experiencing some response time delays as we work to get all of our servers properly balanced. Additionally, we will be adding server capacity over the next week which will further improve response times. While this site is bigger and more complex than and will be somewhat slower than the old site, the difference once we get everything at peak form won’t be very noticeable.

SUPPORT OF NON-IE FOR WINDOWS BROWSERS
Optimizing a site of allmusic’s complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn’t a simple “brochure-ware” site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don’t have the necessary resources to do so. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward.

We are first concentrating on fixing some compatibility issues with the Mozilla browsers, which are mainly visual, not functional. The main Mozilla problem is a glitch in how tables are displayed. We’re hoping to have this fixed in the near future. We will also be working to fix some compatibility problems with Safari (Mac).

We ask for your patience as we work on these issues.

REGISTRATION
The allmusic site remains totally FREE to our users and only requires registration for access to new Premium Content. If you are uncomfortable registering, we understand and invite you to continue to use the portion of the site (roughly equivalent to the former site) that does not require registration. But we would like to take a moment to explain why we have introduced registration for Premium Content. The AMG websites are FREE sites that are marginally supported by only advertising and product sales. To attract advertisers and retailers, we need to provide them with basic demographic information of our users so they can determine if our site is a fit for their products. We provide this information only in the aggregate (i.e. 60% of our users are male, etc.) and never pass on any individual user information. Please read our privacy policy for more information. Without these advertisers and retailers, the AMG websites would be out of business. Registration is a common practice among free publishing sites such as the AMG sites (i.e. NY Times, LA Times, etc.) that fund their enterprise through advertising and product sales. AMG is in line with common Internet practices and, as a good Internet citizen, zealously protects the privacy of our users.

TAB FORMAT
We realized when we designed the tab system that we would make some folks unhappy, but we felt the trade off was worth it. If we stuck to the one page approach it would limit our ability to add additional information. That design approach (one page) just doesn’t scale as we expand content. And it’s a real problem with artists with extensive discographies. We think that once folks take some more time on the site, they’ll see that there is much more information available now than there was on the old site. The addition of the Songs and Credits tabs are both good examples of information that just wouldn’t be possible in a one page format.

One of my favorite music-related websites is All Music Guide, the most comprehensive reference source for music online. (Think IMDB for music.)

So when I heard they were redesigning, I was excited to see if they’d fix my laundry list of complaints with the existing site: the inadequate search engine, their convoluted URL structure, inaccessible and confusing Javascript tricks (like showing/hiding biography text and blocking right-click URL copying), and the frequent server timeouts.

Their redesign launched moments ago. (The old site can still be viewed here. It’s offline now.) They not only failed to fix any of my complaints, but they made it worse. Much worse.

Most frustrating, the site only displays properly in Internet Explorer. (In Firefox, Safari, IE Mac, and Opera, you get a big banner warning that the site is IE Windows-only.) Worse, display bugs make many features of the site unreadable and unuseable in other browsers. All tables are broken, like the search results, track listings and discographies. Some pages, like the New Releases, reposition content off the screen. I can’t tell what’s a hyperlink, because the cursor doesn’t change in anything except Internet Explorer. (July 15, 2004: Almost all of these rendering bugs have been resolved now.)

The problems aren’t limited to display bugs. The URLs are worse than before, now so long that they can’t be sent by e-mail. Biographies, discographies and album reviews are no longer a single page, so you’re forced to click through to multiple pages to view the content you want. And the site’s slower than ever, and I’m periodically getting server timeouts and connection delay error messages. (Oh, and the spinning Flash navigation is a waste of space.)

What a disappointment. As an early beta tester, I sent them a long e-mail outlining my new complaints. Let’s hope they listen. Does anyone know anyone on staff at AMG? I’d love to ask their web guys a few questions.

July 13, 2004: One commenter recommends using MP3.com, which licenses a near-complete database of AMG’s content. The only problems are the missing band member and “worked with” information, individual musician/producer/contributor profiles, genre information, AMG’s Editor Picks, browsing by genre or mood, and a few other features. For most daily usage, it’s a good drop-in replacement for Allmusic.com.

July 13, 2004:: AMG responds! An AMG employee e-mailed me their response to the criticism.