I'm sorry but Al Gore's current.tv website is a MESS!

[StefanX]

It's overdesigned and hard to navigate. It's a candidate for the "Interface Hall of Shame". I expect better from the guy who claims he helped (partially) to invent the Internet. This website is badly designed in so many ways I don't know where to begin. It should be simple and easy to use. It isn't.

First of all, these days a website typically has a LOT of functions, and the job of the main page (and all the other pages) is to tell the user what those functions are, and make it easy to get to them. The premiere example of this is amazon.com. Amazon packs a lot of functionality into the page without the user getting lost.

Amazon's left-hand menu has the following:

Featured Stores
• Apparel & Accessories
• Beauty
• DVD's TV Central
• Electronics
• Jewelry & Watches
• Shoes
• Textbooks

New Stores
In Beta (What's this?)
• Automotive
• Musical Instruments
• Gourmet Food
• Health & Personal Care
• Sports & Outdoors
• Yellow Pages

Books, Music, DVD
• Books
• DVD
• Magazine Subscriptions
• Music
• Video
• Amazon Shorts

Electronics & Office
• Electronics
• Audio & Video
• Camera & Photo
• Office Products
• Software
• Computer & Video Games
• Computers
• Cell Phones & Service

Kids & Baby
• Toys & Games
• Baby
• Imaginarium

Home & Garden
• Bed & Bath
• Furniture & Dιcor
• Home & Garden
• Kitchen & Housewares
• Outdoor Living
• Pet Supplies
• Tools & Hardware

Gifts & Registries
• Baby Registry
• Free e-Cards
• Gift Certificates
• Gift Store
• Wedding Registry
• Wish List

Amazon.com Services
• Photo Services
• Movie Showtimes
• Yellow Pages
• Cars
• Corporate Accounts
• Your Amazon Home
• In-Store Pickup
• Restaurants
• Travel

Bargains
• Auctions
• Bargain Books
• Outlet
• Used
• zShops

A lot of stuff - to keep a lot of people happy. And across the top, they have 3 main meta-menus: Amazon.com (the start page - with submenus Gift Ideas, International, New Releases, Top Sellers, Today's Deals, Sell Your Stuff), Your Store, and "See all 32 Product Categories".

And Amazon have a search box. And a sign-in box. At the top.

Current.tv has a big wide banner across the top - filled with little pixels. Which, if you're bored and have no life, you might discover you can actually click on. Which changes their color. Radical, dude!

But they have no search box. And no LOG IN / REGISTER NOW button. Like 90% of the successful, "sticky" websites out there. I mean, you can go to Barnes & Noble in the Web Design section and buy a book for $40 bucks that will tell you that a "sticky" website needs a menu and a signin/register box and a search box at the top. Why doesn't anyone at current.tv know this??

The whole banner across the top of current.tv's web page is wasted space. I imagine current.tv must have a mission statement and they must have several different offerings. They should promote their mission statement by presenting their offerings in that banner across the top - rather than letting me click on pixels and change their color. We did that back in 1984 when MacPaint came out.

If you look down at the bottom of the screen (which might not be visible if you're a plebe with a small monitor), you will find a menu with four giant pulsating photo-buttons allowing you to go to:

- Current Blog
- Contest Voting
- Create
- Current Studio

First of all, if these are the main options, they should be across the TOP of the page - not down at the bottom (where some monitors can't even see them).

Second of all, what is the difference between "Create" and "Current Studio? (Actually I clicked on both of them and the go to the same place. So there's the answer - no difference. Two big buttons next to each other with totally different names which do exactly the same thing. That's an interface ERROR - no two ways about it.)

Third of all, once you click on most of these options, there's no HOME button to get you back to the main Current.TV page. I've never seen a website like that ever.

If I go into "Current Studio" on the main page, I get another menu:

- Home
- Survival Guide
- Create & Upload
- Screening

Actually, I later realized that the last didn't say "Screening" - it said "Screening Room". Other websites make allowance for guys like me with small monitors and they make sure their whole website fits on ALL monitors - but current.tv lets me know that I'm not part of the elite.

I came here hoping to watch some TV (because I'm young and hip and very visually oriented) and now that I've dug two menu levels deep I might actually get to see some! So I click on "Screening" and get... an error message: "Undefined // NaN NaN". (I'm a programmer and I believe NaN means "not a number". It usually comes up when you divide by zero. Oh well.)

So now I'm two levels deep into the menus trying to watch a video and all I've managed to do is get an error message. But I HAVE seen lots of buttons changing colors and jumping around. I guess that's supposed to appeal to me, because I'm some kind of semi-literate juvenile with a withered cerebral cortex who's been raised on all kind of edgy jump-cut MTV clips. Wow, radical, dude!

Now, back to the "Studio" page. What does "Survival Guide" mean? Is this targeted at viewers or at producers of content? I guess you have to click on it to find out. Yeah, it's something about submitting content. But they have another button that sounds just like that: "Create and Upload".

And what is that microscopic text on the upper left? "ON TV NOW"? And next to it it says "core". But then sometimes it says "gig". Well if that's what it says, how about putting it in bigger letters so people can actually read it.

Hey, I just clicked on "ON TV NOW" on current.tv/studio - and it took me HOME, to current.tv. So congratulations current.tv - you're getting really hip now! You're the ONLY website in the world that doesn't label the "Home" button "Home" - you labeled it "ON TV NOW" instead! Rad, dude!

Right now on the home page there's some text that keeps changing. Sometimes it says "Open the pod-bay doors". Sometimes it says "Current looks taller in person". And sometimes it says "Current belongs to all the boys in the yard." And next to it there's this thing that says "Edit me" in little green letters. If I click on that, it changes to read "Submit me". Click it again and it changes back to "Edit me". What the hell is this for?

OK, I finally figured out what that is - it's like a shoutbox. When I'm in edit mode, I can edit the big text. Wow. It would be nice to know if that edited text actually went somewhere - is it just on my screen, or on everyone's? Other websites (often radio broadcasting ones) have a little shoutbox down the right side of the page. If current.tv wants to do this kind of cool, hip interactivity, a shoutbox might work better - that way we could see everyone's posts listed, not just one. Also, the text in a shoutbox is usually rather silly or trivial - just shoutouts from the viewers - it's not a great idea to make it the main headline on the homepage.

On the left of the main current.tv page, where navigation menus go on 90% of other websites, there's something that looks like a navigation menu, with options "Just on", "On Now", "In 1 Min" etc. If I click on one of these commands, the display changes to show some info about a show. I can't tell whether it's a promo for the show - or whether it's supposed to be actually playing the show. (If it's playing the show, how about a good old-fashioned "Play" button?) If it's a promo, it's not very interesting. Right now, if I click on "ON NOW" I get a big graphic that says "Google current". Is that a video that just happens to be malfunctioning on my machine? I hope so - because if it's a promo, it's worthless. Olgivy has demonstrated that PEOPLE READ COPY - if you give them copy to read. Tell me what "Google Current" is and maybe I'll go out and try to watch it.

Everything jumps around and changes colors on this site but I have broadband and I've been clicking all over the place for like 20 minutes now and I HAVEN'T SEEN ANY VIDEOS. I haven't been lured into signing up. I don't know what the schedule is. I don't know what the purpose of this website is - whether to show videos, or to allow me to nominate ("greenlight") videos I like, or to promote videos for their TV channel. The only "interactivity" I've seen so far is: clicking on a grey pixel at the top of the screen and seeing it turn green, and changing the headline momentarily in the shoutbox banner across the top.

Stop trying to be so "hip" Current.TV and start being functional. Get rid of the flashing video buttons and the changing pixels and the overdone shoutbox and the moving graphics and give me a simple PLAY button so I can watch a damn video or two. Christ, Craigslist.org is one of the top websites out there and look at it's layout - totally plain-vanilla and boring. (But look at its content - it's great! You can find a used computer, a job, an apartment, or a date! And if you like a post, you can nominate it for "Best Of". That's interactivity.)

Current.TV promises to be interactive, but I don't see it. If they show videos, then they should give me a "LOVED IT" button and a "HATED BUTTON" next to the video. Then with a couple of lines of SQL implementing Collaborative Filtering on the back-end (see stumbleupon.com, and Amazon's feature "Other people who bought this book also bought..."), you'll have the best content out there, thanks to your viewers' votes. Let me leave a review under the video so I can feel like my opinion got heard and I can hear what other people have to say. As it is now, this website is less interactive than regular TV, and more isolating that the blogs and bulletin boards us Internet users have gotten used to.

Right now, this is just a bunch of garbled eye-candy getting in the way of whatever content they may have. I know how to use the web and I'm leaving their site now without having seen ANYTHING.

(Plus it didn't come up near the top in Google's pagerank results. How about hiring some programmers who know how to get your page ranked high on Google?)

But you know what's REALLY cool about current.tv? On their banner across the top of the page, that wide gray grid with little pixels on it, you can actually CLICK IN THE PIXELS AND CHANGE THEIR COLOR. Yeah. This kind of interactivity and feedback is really going to turn this country around. Way to go, Al.

[Lars39]

1. Send your gripes to Current if you want to influence them.

[kliljedahl]

2. Never been, is there lot's of Flash?

I've got cable so it's not a problem, but I hate Flash. Sounds like they haven't heard about Meta Names either, or it just sucks so bad it doesn't matter.

[Eric J in MN]

3. What happens when you go this page?

Click greenlight for "From the Fry Daddy to your Car"
http://www.current.tv/studio/media/183

Al Gore's TV Channel

[rocktivity]

4. [e-mail]

I found it at the bottom of the page. And spelled out, too, instead of "e-mail us."

:headbang:
rocknation

[StefanX]

5. OK, I'm going to copy-and-paste my rant

and email it to them. Thanks.