Allmusic is a great site — it catalogs pretty much every musical artist, album and song ever released and reviews an enormous amount of them. A few years ago, however, they redesigned the site in a pretty questionable way, adding clicks in most places to get to content, moving important content off the main artist pages, and adding a login that didn’t remember where you were on the site (it took you to the homepage and the login didn’t stick through the back button). All that being said, a recent release takes the poor UI design to the next level. Check out their new search box:

Without really thinking, I typed in a query, selected “Song” on the dropdown box, and clicked on the “Advanced Search” button. Did I want to go to the advanced search page? Of course not! And, because I, like most web readers, don’t really bother to actually read most text, I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t performed a search. I just thought it had no results, so I went back and tried another search. Eventually, of course, I realized that this interface is just incredibly confusing.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 7:49 pm and is filed under web UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.