Radiohead’s In Rainbows - Good Album, Terrible User Experience
A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free - sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.
I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.
Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?
Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.