Another rant from Tim concerning the new site design. Currently, he is trapped between bewilderment and outright anger...
The last five or six days since the so-called "upgrade" have been, for me, the most frustrating, confusing, maddening days in recent memory. And the timing couldn't have been worse, happening as it did just as a slew of new series were being introduced and old ones were concluding their season run. I don't see how anyone can consider this redesign an improvement in any way. We now have reverted to a childish and confusing skeleton of the UI we had come to love. The former site design was brilliantly functional, visually refined and easily navigated. You could log in and quickly check the left-hand update list, hit the 'more' button and have that essential list of 50 latest new episodes added. This allowed you to be offline for several days, return later and catch right up with the update schedule. Any question as to where I left off with watched episodes was as simple as a cut-and-paste of the show title into my viewing logs' search bar. I would happily have paid an additional fee for the utility of preserving my logs for much longer time periods, if not permanently. But at least I could download my history before it was wiped every few months. That feature is but one of the many functional courtesies we have lost with this new design. Now the viewing logs are filling up with uselessly repeating entries every time I hit 'pause'. Because of that one glitch, my logs contain less than 30% useful entries As a result of all these new changes and omissions, I despair in the knowledge that each day I am falling further and further behind in maintaining any continuity whatsoever in my viewing schedule and record keeping. It's just hit and miss now, and I truly resent being forced into such futile, time-wasting chaos.
LBJEdward, I certainly hope the supposed improved compatibility with mobile devices justifies the degree to which you have royally screwed up the user experience for all the rest of us. It would be a kindness to call your efforts anything other than amateur, childish and dysfunctional. It doesn't look good or perform well. The length of time needed to correct all that is wrong and buggy is going to be many long months, and that assumes you have a large team of experienced coders dedicated to the project. God forbid it's just one or two people working beyond their ability. What you have now is a product which is not yet ready even for beta testing. Yet here we all are, beta testing your unready experiment. The free movies and
episodes are compensation for enduring all the inconvenience.
Merging movies onto a TV site feels like a belt-tightening move to save some money. You might reconsider separate TV and movie sites and even a mobile platform with its own optimized site. Then VIPTV could revert to its former beautiful utility and familiar appearance. Consolidating all those services into one website feels cramped and compromised. Frankly, I'm more than a little put out by this experiment you have forced on us. You obviously lack the tools needed to produce anything near the intuitive utility of the old VIP site. You admitted, for example, the new code not being able to add something as simple as a 'forum' link button. If all this is to make stuff work better on a smart phone, I would consider your priorities terribly misplaced.
Judge for yourself: tally up the favorable comments versus the unfavorable ones in these forums. Or let us kick it up a notch and start a new, prominently displayed thread topic such as "New VIPTV Website Design--Better or Worse? Vote On Rollback To Old Design."
I also have questions as to what the resolution is for shows on this new site. We used to have a choice of standard resolution or HD. That choice is now unavailable, and my initial impression is that I'm not watching HD anymore. Any comment?
One or two final "Boy Do I Miss It" observations: for the first-time visitor landing on the home page, the exhaustive list of all your show titles at the bottom of the page was a great 'all-in-one-place' idea to convey the expansive library available. I also appreciated knowing what show title and episode # was currently playing. Show tracking and record keeping was built in to the old
interface. This new interface demands we create separate text documents in
order to maintain any idea of where we are, where we were and what we have
done. Intuitive navigation is now just a fond and fading memory.
Once it was easy; now it
is hard. Once it was beautiful; now it is not. Once it was fun; now… not so
much. We mourn the passing of a cherished and familiar friend– the VIP
interface. Pray for its return. Is what you have gained indeed worth the cost of what you have lost? We still love you, LBJEdward, but think carefully on what you have done. We are all holding
our collective breath, waiting for this nightmare to end.
