I absolutely hate the new Yahoo TV Listings page. Usually, when you use some spiffy AJAX to dynamically load content it improves user experience. But somehow Yahoo web design team found a way to make it do exactly the opposite.
Essentially, they divided the page into boxes of 10 channels. When the page first loads, you see the first 10. Then if you want to scroll down you get a nice AJAX progress bar which notifies you that the next 10 channels are loading. Your browser kinda freezes up for a second and scrolling becomes jerky and delayed, so you end up waiting for the loading to stop. Finally, you scroll down, and you get another loading dialog. So if you want to check the listings for channels in the 50-60 range you need to look at 5-6 loading screens. Absolutely brilliant!
Of course now you can scroll the content sideways without reloading the page. This would actually be kinda cool, but unfortunately only your current 10-channel box scrolls this way dynamically. All the other boxes stay the same until you scroll up or down. Then you get more loading bars.
Absolutely worst user experience ever. In the past I used the Yahoo listings because they were simple, intuitive and quick. Perhaps they didn’t have the Web 2.0 polish, but who needs fancy AJAX on a TV listing page? Now the usability of the site is close to zero.
Sigh… Time to find a new place where to get my local TV listings. Any suggestions?
[tags]tv, tv listings, yahoo, yahoo tv, yahoo tv listings, yahoo sucks, yahoo tv listings suck[/tags]
A new place – stuck for that, but you could always fall back on a local paper…
:)
Yeah, but you can’t do incremental search on a newspaper. Nor you can on the new Yahoo page for that matter, but I used to be able to do that.
That, and it is not instantly available when I need it and/or may not be up to to date.
Yeah thats why I stopped using Yahoo listings and switched to zap2it.
I like MeeVee Guide for my TV listings
At this point, even TVguide.com looks more usable than Yahoo, even though these guys have their own share of Ajax on their site too.
Yep, it blows goats. the part that annoys me the most is that you have to click through several screens to get to the original air date info for the current episode of a show — if it’s there at all.
GO BACK TO THE OLD UI, YAHOO!