The AllMusic relaunch is the worst I've seen in maybe five years. The amount of visual clutter seems to increase with every page, there's nonstandard DHTML that only works in IE, s a largely-useless Flash navigation widget, an enormous banner ad floating in whitespace, information that used to be in one place has split up into multiple screens, etc. I could go on, but it's sufficient to say any general-public site redesign that requires a manual is a failure on a number of levels. And that's not even addressing the terrible performance problems, both on the browser end and--judging from the frequent unavailability of the site--from the server end.
But this is not the fault of producers who crossed the "should-can line" when specifying fancy gadgets (a term Molly uses when talking about fashion: just because you can doesn't mean you should), or designers who designed interfaces that could only work with IE, or engineers who didn't load test the new design. No. They were never given guidance that would have allowed them to prioritize those things appropriately. The fault lies squarely with management.
A site rollout this bad and a design this convoluted points to a fundamentally damaged management structure. Only bad management, myopic, arrogant or dangerously negligent management can produce something this bad. The site owners took a site with great contents and a loyal user base and, with little regard of those people actually valued, decided to throw it away.
Here's my prediction of how the management decisions embodied in this design will affect the company in the next 24 months:
The management is probably too proud to admit that all of the effort of this relaunch is a failure. They won't throw it out, reinstall the old site and go back to the drawing board to examine the problems that led to this redesign. Instead, I predict that they'll try to push through and "fix" the site, which is of course not what's at fault, really. It's a symptom of a broken process. Someone's head will roll--either the head designer, engineer or product director, whoever "owns" the product. More pressure will be put on the development team, who are probably already demoralized and exhausted from the death march of having to launch the thing in the first place. Any system this broken will certainly have been a death march--the announcements over the last couple of weeks that it was launching were probably as much public threats to force the developers to launch it as they were to inform the audience (how did they expect the audience to prepare for a new design? Such announcements do not build buzz, they're symptoms of corporate fear). Within six months the good people will leave, since they don't need the stress brought on by management panic and pressure (and besides, they can put it on their resume now). New hires will have to learn the system and deal with the residual staff, who are likely to be the least qualified people on the old team, but who now have seniority and will have been promoted into the positions of the good people who left.
Ad revenue for this quarter, maybe the next two quarters, will go up as the sales team can use the new design to extract more money from their connections. The management may even convince themselves that this means it's a success, if a painful one. It's not. Within a year, the novelty of the new design will have worn off for ad buyers, who will be buying less. Sales will put pressure on product managers to create new features that will attract users.
All the while users will be abandoning it. If not actively spreading the word about how bad the site is, they'll not be telling others how good it will be, thus diminishing the quality of whatever brand value AllMusic may have had (the other thing the new site was probably set up to do). At some point, probably two years from now, the company will have laid off everyone, and kept a skeleton crew of editors and writers as freelancers to preserve the illusion of fresh content. This will further dilute the value of the site, and eventually even the tiny cost of maintaining this group of underpaid creatives will no longer be justifiable. They'll then shut it down and sell the assets (i.e. the database of reviews) to someone at a rock bottom price, who will put up the static content with Google contextual ads pointing to Amazon and Ebay. They'll extract the last little bit of value from it, like glue from a racehorse.
I certainly hope I'm wrong--I clearly like AllMusic enough to write all this--but I've seen it happen often enough. So what to do? Here's my first order recommendation to the management of AllMusic: roll back the current design, admit you have a big organization problem that allowed it to happen, try to understand what that problem was, figure out what problems the redesign was trying to address--no the REAL problems, those that you're thinking now are your guesses at solutions to deeper problems, go one level, two levels back, THOSE problems. Meanwhile, try to understand why people come to your site, why advertisers give you money, and start making small changes, one at a time, one per month and watch the effect they have on how people use your site. In two years, you'll probably be making a lot more money than even if all of the gimmicks on the current site worked, which they don't.
