How often do we see it? A company has a winning product that everyone likes. Then they tweak it to the point where it becomes almost useless. Well, Yahoo has done it with their on-line television guide.
For years, I used it faithfully to help me figure out all my choices on Direct TV in the Pacific Time Zone. It loaded quickly when I requested it, allowed me to look at any time to see what was on any channel. I could then click on a channel to see all their offerings for a 24 hours period. I could look forward in time (and even backwards) to figure out what I might want to watch. If I saw a particular program that I might be interested in watching, I could click on it to read the details.
Then, what was really cool, I could click on it to automatically add it to my calendar. This was particularly useful during football season so I could see what games where being shown when, especially college football as there were so many games to chose from (I only watch the ones that interest me). As silly as it sounds and lest you think that I spend all my time watching football, it helped me plan my day, so I only watched the best of the best games.
Not only would the game or a particular TV show appear on my calendar, it would show up on my "My Yahoo" page. But wait...there is more. Yahoo would automatically send me an e-mail at the start of a day to tell me what was on my calendar for that day.
Their old system really worked well, and it help me be really choosy about which programs I watched. Again, you would think by reading this that I watch TV all the time. Not true. This Yahoo system helped me figure out what programs were worth my time (and very few are). As you probably know, I have a great many interests and obligations, so it is important to me how I budget my time. Yahoo's TV guide system really helped me a lot.
So, how did they screw this up? Well, they must have decided that it didn't look "cool" enough. So they redesigned its look and feel. Unfortunately, while it may look cooler, it doesn't work. The page takes forever to load. While I am writing these words, it is still trying to load. If you scroll down, there is nothing on the page. You wait a few seconds, and you may get something, but you have no idea what channel is going to be shown on your screen...and the channel numbers are missing.
And, you can no longer look at what's on any particular channel for the next 24 hours. And, worst of all, you can't add a program to your calendar. In short, it doesn't work. Yahoo says this site is now in beta, but it doesn't give you a way of telling them what works, what doesn't, and how you feel about it, which is what beta testing is all about. It's still trying to load, by the way.
Because Yahoo TV has become worthless, I switched over to AOL's TV Listings. It loads quickly, shows me what's on now and in the future, and in some ways is even better than the old Yahoo TV guide. It does have a calendar reminder, but I haven't used it yet and don't feel like adding yet another calendaring program to my repertoire.
In playing with Yahoo's TV guide before writing this entry, I found that it does load faster in Internet Explorer than Firefox, but still not fast enough to be useful. I have seen other examples of these kinds of "improvements"done before, but I won't go into them now.
However, if you have some examples of taking a good thing and making it bad, I would love to hear about them.
PS...It is still loading.
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