schlackman.org

It seems like I have more bad to say about Virgin Digital than good recently. I still have no doubt that they are the best UK service available at the moment, but right now that honour only falls to them by virtue of the others being that little bit worse.

Recently Virgin moved the bulk of their service (everything except the subscription service) to a browser based system instead of the dedicated player software they used before. They then seemingly abandoned what was left of the old client to work on the new one, and it stopped working once IE7 was launched. After (presumably) enough customers complained, they then U-turned and fixed it. One thing I did spot is that even after it was fixed, they quietly stopped updating the media guide, so to the casual observer it looked like no music had been released for over a month, though recent releases were fully available if you knew what to search for.

On Friday, they finally launched the subscription system on the new website. I say finally not only because it should have launched when the rest of the site launched, but also because they sent out emails announcing that it was live, then suddenly realised it wasn’t live and took the site down for 3 hours to update it. When it came back up, I took a good look over the new system and I’m sorry to report the results were less than satisfying. Roughly 10% of the times that I clicked on a click I got a server error, and when I did get to see the site I wasn’t that impressed.

Things only got worse from there. Right now, this is all you get when visiting:

Guys, this is why you don’t launch a new system on a Friday before a major international holiday. Note also that ‘circumstances’ is spelled incorrectly, such is the rush they are in.

So, what can we expect when it returns? And why has it been taken completely offline?

Wait a second, let’s not even think as far ahead as that. What about right now? What worries me sligthly is that the launch email said that access to Virgin Digital via the old player software – currently the only functioning product – would be withdrawn on the 26^th December. Let’s hope they reconsider that cut-off and that’s it’s not on some timer that no-one has remembered to postpone.

Before I get started, let me say that new new player does have some good things about it. The interface is on the whole bigger than it used to be and as such less fiddly to use, and a bit more intuitive. On the technical side, it finally respects the Windows Media Player options for WMA playback, which for me at least, means that it now plays back on all 4 channels of my soundcard instead of just the front 2. Also, as I quickly found, when it does go wrong it produces readable and useful error messages, which the old player was incredibly bad at.

However, right now, these advantages are seriously outweighed by the problems. The new system has promise, but it also stinks of a system that was pushed out way too early in order to meet an arbitrary corporate deadline. The system simply is not ready, and that is reflected not only in the multitude of problems but confirmed by the fact it is now completely offline over the Christmas break. The sad thing is that the developers will almost certainly take the blame for this, when the real culprit is the person who insisted it be ready in time for Christmas.

The 2 biggest problems I found were these:

1. Frequent ASP server errors. Usually trying again later worked around them, but still a bit of a problem.
2. Downloading subscription tracks is completely broken. It simply doesn’t work. Any attempt to do results in an error message stating:

   Problem with Purchase
   Unfortunately, there was a problem with your purchase.
   Extra Info : Unable to retrieve download url

   I raised a ticket on this problem and it was acknowledged as a known issue.

Those are probably the two that caused the site to be taken offline, and are the ones I expect to be fixed first. However, I have a good number of other issues with the site. Sadly, this is almost certainly not an exclusive list, but given the site was only up for a short time this is what I found during my review.

• Lost functionalityThe simple fact is that the new site does not have some of the basic functionality that the old player has:
  1. The ‘Browse Artist’ and ‘Browse Album’ options don’t exist. In the old player, I can right-click a streaming track in the playlist and select either of these options to view more music by the same artists or that appears on the same album as the track in question. I use these options all the time, and they simply don’t exist in the new web-based player. The closest we now have is a link to the artists page for the currently playing track (not any track in the playlist as before. What’s more, this link does nothing at the moment, and is presumably simply broken.
  2. There is no download manager. The old player would manage my track downloads very nicely, automatically naming them and sorting them into folders according to preferences I specified. The new system simply bungs them all into one big zip file (or at least it will once they get it working) with predefined names that I then have to rename and sort manually. This is a chore, and one I am really not happy about. I can only assume at this point that the server supports download resuming, since I’ve never been able to get a download to start.
  3. The media guide is even less detailed than before. This is actually pretty shocking given that the media guide was pretty spartan before. Maybe they think that every customer knows exactly what they are looking for, but as a subscription customer sold on the premise of being able to explore new music, I’m not happy with this. Once thing I immediately missed was from the ‘New Releases’ list; in the old player there is a button marked ‘More’ which will give me the last 20 tracks featured there before the current list (of only 5-6 tracks) usurped them. This now doesn’t exist, so if I don’t check it as frequently as it gets updated I’ll simply miss new releases. All this without even considering that the HMV media guide features about 50 ‘New Releases’ for a genre at any one time…

  Now, the premise for moving over to the web-based service is that “By moving to a new web-based platform we can continually improve the service and add new features”. Hopefully they’ll start by putting some of the old ones back.

• The search functionality doesn’t work as well as the search in the old software. The problem comes when searching for an artist (or anything for that matter) that has any diacritical mark in the name. “Beyoncé”, for example. In the old player, if I searched for beyonce, it would find her. Now, it does not; in order to find what I’m looking for, I must enter beyoncé, complete with the accent.I can see how this has happened. The developers are based in Luxembourg, where the Swiss-French keyboard layout is typically used, which has accented keys on it. Therefore, it’s simple to enter these characters. However, in the UK and US (the two markets that Virgin Digital operates in) these keys simply aren’t on the keyboard, and most people have absolutely no idea how to enter them (for those wondering, you can either copy them from Character Map or use keyboard shortcuts such as AltGr+e to get an é). Frankly, this is a big problem when you’re operating in English-speaking countries. If I want to search for Beyoncé, Björk, Röyksopp, or anyone else with a non-English character in their name, it’s quite tricky. Plus, any newcomer would have to know that this problem even existed instead of simply thinking that Virgin didn’t carry these artists and giving up.
• On a related note, and a problem which perhaps reveals why the above problem exists, is the first of the website design problems that the current site has. Let’s look quickly at a section of the page for Beyoncé, which I have finally managed to find now I know that the problem is:

  The page title (and URL) for each artist seems to consist solely of a lowercase plain text version of their name. In this case, it’s even worse: the é has been replaced with the numbers 233. This is significant because the é is UTF-8 character code #233. I suspect that what has happened is that when the ‘plain text’ versions of each entry have been created for the database, specifically to work around the above problem by replacing accented characters with plain version, it has screwed up and substituted the numerical code instead. I wasn’t able to test it in time before the site was taken offline, but I’ll bet if I searched for beyonc233 I would have found this page.

  Even once the encoding is sorted, the page title needs to be better than this. It’s a trivial error that detracts from the professionalism of the site. Page titles are not some invisible bit of text that no-one looks at, especially now that we have tabbed browsing in IE7 as well as Firefox. Which brings me onto my next gripe…

• The site doesn’t work in Firefox. Admittedly neither do any of their competitors, but that’s no excuse. Most of the site seems to work OK, but the subscription player displays error messages stating that Internet Explorer is required and doesn’t play any tracks. This isn’t even funny. Just last week, it was reported that Firefox market share in the UK is at 12%. Typically, these are the more tech-savvy users who are more likely to use a service such as Virgin Digital. By not supporting it, you piss off a good chunk of your market, including me. It could be that this problem is unintentional – the site does install a Firefox plugin that certainly implies it should work, but the contradictory error message suggests that Firefox support was perhaps a late decision, and one that obviously wasn’t ready in time, or was withdrawn.Annoying as it is, this isn’t the end of the world. I was happy using an entirely separate application for Virgin Digital before, and so it doesn’t kill me to have to launch IE to use it now. However, it does fly in the face of why they are moving to a web-based service in the first place; I still can’t use my regular browser.
• Back to the subject of page design. The actual site design itself is pretty nice, but I do have a complaint; there’s simply not enough bloody room on the page for actual content. There are a few things I think they’ve done wrong here.
  1. Fixed page width.I didn’t like fixed page widths in 1995 when I started using the internet and I don’t like them now, especially since I use an above average screen resolution. The page a fixed size (966px wide) that assumes you are using a 1024×768 screen resolution. If you use something higher, you just get blank space at the sides of the page. That’s blank space that I could be using to read the damned content. I didn’t buy a big monitor for nothing.

     I can understand why they’ve done it. Designing a resizeable page layout is harder than making a fixed one, but that’s not an excuse. It’s just a sign of laziness. I don’t see HMV using a fixed page width, a competitor site which has a significantly richer media guide, I might add. However, this would not be so bad if not for the rest of the problems…

     Since they are obviously aiming for monitors using 1024×768, let’s take a look at what the page looks like at that size, in IE7, with the Luna theme, which is of course what the default settings are in XP.

     

  2. The Shopping Basket is too damned big.At this size, the available height for the page in Internet Explorer is 620px. The Shopping Basket, not including the fade line, covers 100px of that, or 16%. As you can see, this isn’t something that appears at the bottom of the page after all the content; it stays on the screen as you scroll up and down. Sure, the menu and header on the page is pretty huge too, but that at least disappears when I scroll down. Screen real estate is precious enough without chopping off nearly a sixth of it for what is essentially an empty space waiting to be filled. Every other e-commerce site I’ve ever used is quite content with putting the shopping basket at the side, or at the top. Why have this huge ‘drag stuff here’ box anyway? Are they afraid that people won’t work out that the yellow ‘Buy’ button next to every track and album will allow them to buy it?

     The simplest solution is to make the basket hideable, much like the new user instruction panel on the home page of the site. Really though, it should be smaller, and at the top of the page somewhere. The time for innovation in e-commerce design was about 3 years ago, guys; stop trying to reinvent the damn thing and look at what works. Amazon may think they have a patent on their e-commerce design but there’s a reason everyone copies it.

  3. The advert is also too big.It’s not the advert itself which annoys me, which is somewhat surprising when you consider that as a subscriber I am paying them money just to look at the site. Part of me thinks I shouldn’t be seeing an advert at all; this isn’t some free ad-supported service on Geocities. However, you could very well consider the entire site as one giant advertisement, and when it comes down to it, I was actually quite interested to see that the V for Vendetta DVD was on sale because it’s a good film that I actually do want to own on DVD. I doubt it was that precisely targeted, but as long as ads on the site remain relevant to me I don’t have a huge problem with them. What I do dislike is that fact that the ad takes up so much room. Not content with limiting me to a fixed width, they then take up over 200px of that (over 20%!) with an advert, when that space could be used to used to show me the actual content I came to the site for. What worse is that the space below the ad is just a completely blank space; the page content doesn’t wrap around below it.

     The ads need to be be about a quarter of the size they are now, and not further limit the available width for the real content. This is basic, amateur stuff we’re dealing with here.

  4. Some of the interface is actually too small.Tragically, given the overall propensity for enlarging the interface, some of the text is almost to small to read. Take a look in the image above at some of the text in the shopping basket, for example. I thought the blurriness was due to ClearType’s anti-aliasing at first, but when I compared it without ClearType it was actually worse. Click the image here to see it at 200% zoom for comparison:

     

I’ve been deliberately quite critical here since Virgin Digital, unlike Napster, has no forum for feedback on the service. Also, they’ve taken a big gamble by completely replacing a working and full-featured program with something completely new. It’s important to note though that for every single thing I’ve mentioned here, I’ve suggested a way to fix it, and in most cases they are easy fixes. I really hope they can get some (preferably all) of this stuff sorted out soon. The new Virgin Digital service has the potential not only to knock its current competitors down but also potentially see off competition from iTunes if they ever enter the subscription market. Right now, they aren’t in that strong a position. It won’t take much actual work to put them there, but it will require stronger decisions about the system’s development than they are apparently taking at the moment. The should start by insisting on more extensive testing, and not be afraid to say ‘no’ to the marketing idiots who insist on meeting arbitrary deadlines, no matter the cost. Hopefully they’ll learn from the current problems that sometimes the cost is too high.

One of their CS representatives once reminded me that Virgin Digital is still a young branch of the Virgin Group. Perhaps their first step should be to get some more seasoned web consultants on board to help them avoid the silly mistakes they are falling into right now.