The horror is spreading. A few months ago I broke up with TV Squad over their new layout, which took the television blog and merged it with AOL's "Inside TV" blog, which was essentially a collection of posted television clips from the previous night. The result was a disaster - horrific technical problems, hideous formatting, and greatly watered-down content. I struggled for months with the site's multiple new aggravations before finally calling it quits.
A few weeks ago, my favorite movie blog, Cinematical, was acquired by Moviefone and followed suit. Despite promises from the editorial staff that nothing was really changing in spite of their new corporate sponsorship, they soon adopted the exact same graphic format as TV Squad, one that uses too much white space and makes the articles more difficult to read on my laptop screen. The content thankfully didn't change, but there were several technical issues to deal with, like the commenting system becoming less user-friendly and a multiplicity of sidebars and link blocks. It was the massive graphics that irked me the most, though, because they took up so much space and required so much additional scrolling.
Then other sites started following suit. At the end of September, the individual film pages of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) suddenly changed over to a new format. Now they're dominated by graphics, and the neat, easy-to-navigate navigational column with its links to the Trivia, Awards, Goofs, Quotes, and other sections has disappeared. You have to do some serious scrolling to get to information that was available at a glance in the previous versions, like running time, rating, and release date. A little clicking around will bring up supplemental information in the old format, with all the old shortcuts intact, but finding anything on the main page requires much more effort than it used to.
Poke around the web a little, and you'll find other recent website and blog redesigns all focused on bigger graphics, clunkier designs, and harder-to-navigate pages that give you less information and use up much more space. It took me a few weeks to figure out what the hell was going on, but finally it hit me. If you shrink the new pages down in size, to the way they would appear on a mobile device like an iPhone, suddenly the graphics don't look big at all. The links are easier to click with a fingertip because they're less crowded together, and scrolling is a breeze. The new IMDB page is much easier to view on a mobile device with Internet browsing capabilities.
The problem is that I don't use an iPhone or a Droid, or anything of the sort. I'm still using a web browser to browse the web, and I'll bet the majority of the users who are visiting these websites are too. Redesigning IMDB into a giant iPhone app seems like a great, forward-thinking idea - except that an app doesn't make for a very good website. Fortunately there is an option to automatically revert to views of the older versions of the IMDB pages, but only if you're registered with the site and have access to the personal preference options. The mobile-device-friendly version remains the default for everyone else. And frankly, it stinks. Why must a long-established website suddenly start catering to a small minority of early adopters while giving the rest of its user base headaches?
I can just hear the defensive protestations now. Everybody is going to have a mobile device eventually, whether it's one of the new Smartphones or other devices, right? So surely websites and bloggers need to make the drastic changes quickly in order to stay on the cutting edge. It's all well and good to accommodate mobile users, but I doubt there's anyone who's a mobile user all the time. A simplified version of the IMDB might be fine to scroll through on an iPhone, but it's not as useful and not as valuable to me as having the original version available for reference when I get home, the version that gets me to use IMDB over Wikipedia or another information source in the first place.
I know it's too much to hope for IMDB to scrap the new design completely and revert to the older one, but I'm hoping that they'll listen to the chorus of complaints in the wake of the changes and find some sort of happy medium to make both the mobile and the stationary users happy. As for Cinematical, I've resorted to reading the blog through an RSS feed. This still requires me to visit the site in order to read their full posts and articles, but at least the scrolling issues are mostly alleviated.
Now I just have to figure out why my Gmail account suddenly thinks that I'm reading my E-mails from a Blackberry, and has taken away all my navigation panels. If I give in and buy an iPhone, will Google please put them back?
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