What's your opinion of the Itunes site?

[Corey]

Just curious, what is your opinion of this site:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

I'm not digging it and I want to see if it's just me...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[eric_darling]

Just curious what's bugging you about it?

Apple certainly made a concerted effort to keep it in the Apple paradigm - the menus, graphics and layout are constrained by that.

I think the Apple site, in general, is very good. I don't happen to be an iPod or iTunes customer, so I can't say I frequent that part of their site. I find the interface a bit unique, so navigation takes a bit of familiarization. It's not overly bad, though.

Still, I bet it is heavily accessed since the Apple iPod holds a 31 percent market share (http://in.tech.yahoo.com/040106/137/2ark3.html) among all MP3 player manufacturers as of Q1 2004.

[longedge]

Is it the way some fonts display? Looked at it from my desktop at work today and it looked really awful almost like an 8x8 matrix. On my laptop at home now and just had another look it displays fine.

[Corey]

Well in a broad sense I find it cluttered and hard to parse. But in a more specific sense I find it has no clear data hierarchy and also that the content is dull and unentertaining. This holds true across the various pages, lots of tiny text. Also they seem to change the content on that page only a few times per month, and it's static, i.e. if you refresh nothing changes.

The color choices and low contrast between the body text and orange background color is unappetizing. But most of all I would say that no human could parse that page "at a glance" and glean "just what they want" without being forced to parse a bunch of non-wanted content. To me that is the hallmark of poor quality design staff. Heurstically speaking (http://user-experience.org/uefiles/writings/heuristics.html) it's sketchy.

For a single example they put the left links near the bottom of the page (???) and the number one priority link they placed at the top of the list is "Send Gift Certificates". (???) Where we all expect a section navigation (upper left) we get a "W Hotels" ad instead? The funny thing is that there is zero chance of me ever visiting a W Hotel but if I want to use iTunes I'm forced to read that ad every time I visit the page because it sits exactly where I expect the navigation to be. They did that on purpose, it's part of that Donny Deutsch school of marketing which says, "Target the largest group of consumers who will accept excessive product placements and forget about the rest. Use whatever trickery you need to in order to get them to read your ads. Repeat your ads as much as possible."

I understand the approach but nonetheless it doesn't make it any less sickening to be forced to read a bunch of ads which are totally meaningless to my life.

In a larger sense, Apple (and the media) will have you believe that this is all wildly successful, ("beyond *anyone's* expectations" they said in the press) despite the fact that things like their recent Pepsi promo *failed miserably*(Less than 5% redeemed) by their own admission, and also the fact that none of us buy iTunes. I'm very wary of anyone who tells me that "their product is everywhere" when not a single one of my friends, who are all *extreme* consumers of music *and* early adopters, are using it. I've yet to hear the word "iTunes" mentioned by anyone in the real world.

Just as a side observation, despite having some of the top business experts in the world, it's *amazing* how Apple remains self-admittedly consistently inaccurate about their own expectations year after year after year. A circus chicken with yes/no food pellet chutes would be more accurate than those guys. I would be embarrassed to put out press release after press release announcing how innacurate my expectations of my own work turned out to be, especially if I had a gloabl team of high paid business experts behind me. :) Actually not just embarrassed, "mortified" would be a better description. No wonder none of those guys can find IT work whenever a wave of them gets laid off...

Anyhow suffice to say I wouldn't use that site. It's not relevant to me nor that way I approach music consumption. The main thing is the clutter and lack of entertaining or compelling content.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[eric_darling]

Well, your opinions regarding Apple management as a roving band of thieves aside, I guess I'd have to agree with your general assessment after further looking at that part of their site. It is cluttered and without much direction. I'd have to say that as a customer of other Apple products for a long time, I think this part of their site is out of step with their usually clean and easy to navigate web pages. So, fair play to your review, Corey.

[Corey]

Well I don't know about "roving", but I agree that their main web site is normally quite good. Usually most of their visicom stuff such as web and print promos and ads are quite good too.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software (http://www.indigorose.com)

[eric_darling]

Well I don't know about "roving"

- :) -