Has Common Sense Vanished?

Verizon sends me a schedule of all their cable channels in an otherwise useless booklet on glossy paper. The schedule fails to separate the pay on demand channels from the ones that come by general subscription. Their on screen management of these two categories is equally non-intuitive and onerous.

For the heck of it, I choose a given channel, Reelz, in order to discover what movies they show. Their web site has no document or schedule or summary of the movies. One has to go day by day by day and then scroll down to find the movies. I choose another channel, Showtime. This web site is better in that it has a table-schedule, but no matter where you place the cursor, a box comes up that covers a portion of the schedule, making it unreadable as a whole. When you scroll down, the designer failed to add the strip across the top showing the times of the movies in the lower 2/3 of the page. Ok, after 3 experiences like this in a row, and others at other web sites, I begin to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t go into business designing web sites that might actually make life easy for people like me who want information. More seriously, I wonder if the people who do this work have any common sense left. Am I biased? I don’t think so because a few months back Netflix (which subsequently practically self-destructed) altered its web site for no reason at all, and received a ton of complaints including one from me. What they did was get rid of the capacity to search and sort their movies!! Instead the only way to see what they had was endless scrolling through lists. They have now gone back to their original page. The web designers often seem clueless about the information that people seek and how to provide it cleanly and efficiently.

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9:57 am on March 6, 2012