I've only blogged once before about the California Festival, but it is upon us, starting this Friday, November 3. I'm not going to be able to get out of the Bay Area in the first two weeks of the month, owing to reviews the next two weeks and looming work deadlines, so it took until today for me to take a look at the Festival's web site. That was with prompting from a friend, who mentioned that he "was hoping [I'd] tell [him] there was some obvious way of sorting the California Festival events by location on their website."
Well, I looked, and I was appalled by what I saw. Let me count, er, bullet-list the issues:
- There's no way to sort the events by location. This is a real problem with a festival that stretches from Fort Bragg to somewhere south of San Diego. (I think - the map to the left of the concert list is of dubious usefulness because you can't click on a location and see what's being performed there or when.)
- The address for each participating organization in the chronological listing bears no resemblance to the concert locations and in some cases to the physical location of the organization. I am highly dubious that 15 Van Ness Avenue is the, or a, correct address for the San Francisco Symphony, one of the three orchestras that organized the festival. That's not the address of Davies Symphony Hall, and in fact it's south of Market Street! What's with the Nordhoff St. address of the Colburn School of Music in LA? The school is across the street and down the block from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Nordhoff Street seems to be...in "Sherwood Forest"?
- You can't copy/paste from the concert list page.
- You can't do an effective search on the concert list page because the page doesn't scroll in response to a search in your browser.
- The site is slow, even on my M2 Mac Mini. Transitions from page to page don't actually take forever, but it seems that way: I'm counting between two and three seconds when you navigate from a details page to the list page. Whoever designed the site seems not to have tested on older computers.
- It's...ugly. Somehow there's enough contrast on the concert listing page even though I think that it features green type on a cream background.
- All those exploding graphics do nothing for usability; they slow down the site; there are two of them every time you navigate from concert details to the concert listing.
- There is no persistence! If you view a particular listing, when you click Back, you are taken back to listings for November 3. That's right: view a listing for November 17, try to get back to the list page, and you'll be looking at listings for November 3.
Folks, web sites are about 30 years old. I created my person web site in 1996, with a copy of Laura LeMay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. That web site is still posted, though I rarely update it. It is much faster to navigate than the California Festival web site, because it's as basic as you can get. Regardless, there is no damn excuse for a festival sponsored by three of the biggest performing arts organizations in the state to have such a very terrible web site.
3 comments:
Well, here's an explanation of the Colburn School address, in case you want to add some bullets to your list. The Nordhoff address is actually the location of The Soraya, the big auditorium at Cal State Northridge, where the first of the four festival concerts presented by the Colburn takes place (the school's student orchestra conducted by E-PS: the school itself doesn't have an orchestra-sized hall). The other three Colburn concerts take place at the school itself, either at Zipper (lovely chamber music hall) or at Thayer (classroom with a stage). But you have to get pretty far into the weeds to find that out.
To learn the location of each concert, click on the "More Details" button, which takes you to a complete listing of all four events; then for each of the four events click on "Buy Tickets". For the orchestra concert this takes you the Soraya's page for the concert. For one of the remaining three this takes you to the Colburn page for the concert. For the other two, clicking on "Buy Tickets" takes you to the top level page for the school, itself apparently designed to inform prospective students and their parents and only secondarily to assist concert goers. At that point you're on your own: find the complete concert listing, find the series containing the particular event, find the event, then learn the event location. Then, if you're not too disgusted, buy a ticket.
Underneath all of this is presumably a relational database designed by someone whose knowledge of classical music presentation is about on the same level as that of the original designers of Spotify, and whose competence in database design is even worse. In particular, the designer doesn't understand that the presenter of a concert is not necessarily the same as the performer, and that the location of a concert could be different from the location of the presenter's head office. That the location of the Colburn School should be taken to be the location of the first of a series of independent events -- well, you can imagine the kind of thinking that went into that. And there's no way to fix it without throwing everything out and starting over. Who tested this before going public?
Holy cow.
To answer your question: nobody did.
Actually, the designers of the festival website have failed at a very difficult task. Database design is supposed to be top down, and this site pretends to be top town, with a list of concerts as its top level item. But in fact the idea is apparently to get the user off the festival site as quickly as possible and onto the sites of the various individual concert presenters, without forcing these presenters into any big revisions to their data design (because most would simply refuse to do that). And these various sites with their underlying data were all designed independently and probably have rather little in common. So the festival is forced into a bottom-up data design linking otherwise uncoordinated lower-level data. This is the sort of thing they tell you in school not to do.
The idea of the festival sounds great: create an umbrella organization for pre-existing events, with the aim of encouraging presenters to include a lot of new music and coordinating the publicity, while also increasing collaboration between the orchestras of SF, LA, and SD, all excellent and progressive organizations with a lot in common (e.g. so many ties to Finland and Venezuela). But the data programming tasks are a lot trickier than the musical programming tasks.
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