I have always been a fan of the TV listings site www.onthebox.com. I always liked the simplicity of the site and the ease with which you could line up any selection of channels to see what’s on.
Today I had a quick look to see if I could find out what footie games are on TV tonight, and it seems that since my last visit there has been a redesign and rebuild (my last visit could potentially have been some time ago!)
My first thought was “thank god they’ve kept the simple channel listing”. This is the key to the site’s usability. Choose from the drop-down and it lets you choose which channels to show.
However, some of the new changes seem a little bit flashy with no substance – in fact I prefer the old version in some respects. Example: choose a channel from the drop-down and it goes away and reloads the channel guide immediately. Fine, but not when it takes 20 seconds to do so, and any other changes I make to the other channels are ignored once it reloads. Seems slightly pointless. There are lots of bits on the new site where windows zoom out at you, with nice transparent backgrounds. The login box appears as if by magic. Great – but actually not as good as a simple login box, for which I can make Firefox remember my login details.
Overall I think the new site is OK; but I’m not blown away by it. My two biggest problems are the speed (maybe I was unlucky but it seems unreasonably slow) and the flashy features that don’t actually offer a user experience as good as if they weren’t there at all. I think it shows what can happen when you don’t keep things simple, and when you introduce flashy ways of doing things just for the sake of it, without keeping a keen eye on the resulting useability.
Not bad though if you want to check if the latest Spurs game in on TV – always a good laugh watching “top four” Spurs getting beaten by Sunderland etc..