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Why Radiohead is missing tons of sales: bad website
Oct 11, 2007
Lots of people are talking about the new album from Radiohead, since customers can name their own price when they download it.
One major problem, which I haven't seen mentioned in the press, is that the user experience on the site is really confusing. Imagine the popularity of the album if Radiohead had just launched a simple, easy to use website!
Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo and frequent Gel conference attendee, gives a quick demo of the problem, from the user's perspective:
(Thanks, Amit)
Speaking of good experience, where's a link to the demo?
Looks like whoever was running their website screwed up pretty badly for the past day or two.
As of 7:00 am pacific time, October 12, it appears that radiohead.com first redirects you to http://www.inrainbows.com, which is the "in rainbows" store window, and you can buy stuff immediately.
Still, too bad for them that this wasn't working say, on the day of the launch so they could take advantage of the publicity they had generated.
What a great critique. A running video commentary can be SO effective at clearly communicating an experience. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is surely worth a million.
We're convinced {here at my place of work} that video can be used to powerfully impact and change aspects of the workplace culture. Especially when employees are invited and given the power to provide the learnings. Selling the importance of initiatives {Diversity of race, of thought} and telling the story of what doesn't work, what frustrates, what's broken.
Word-of-mouth... video-of-vision? How powerful is w-o-m with connected with video? v-o-v... Very powerful.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the site is a bad experience. I wrote about this very issue last week: http://www.ux-sa.com/2007/10/radiohead-great-idea-ruined-by-bad-user.html . What perplexes me most is that UX Magazine says the site "tells the story clearly but keeps a stylish edge."
Funny and relevant-- band websites are notoriously bad at providing basic links to purchase the latest album or merch and find tour dates, etc. Usually bands can blame their labels, who generally maintain control of their websites (only to neglect them), but Radiohead has no excuse...
I beg to differ on this one...
The first time I visited Radiohead's Web site, circa 1996, I did find the experience totally confusing. But I stayed on the band-wagon and went through the whole site.
Back then, it was divided into little pieces of words grouped randomly... a bit like their masterpiece of that period, OK Computer.
The Web site seemed to be an extension of their music, and now again, although the site might not be pleasing to ergonomists or "experienceologists", their fans know how to get around the site, and believe me, they have millions of them :)
So even though the site is chaotic and not user-friendly, the evangelist customers, like Chip Conley calls them, will still do the WOM and get sales for Radiohead.
But between you and me, Radiohead doesn't do money off of album sales... it does from derived products and concerts.
I loved the Chip Conley posts btw, Mark :)
thanks :)
Great video. It looks like Radiohead fixed this a little bit, but it is still way to confusing. I'm staring at a page that tells me I can buy it in two formats (discbox and download) but can't click on either, while some trippy graphics are loading in the background so I can't tell if something else is coming or what is going on.
Interesting update. I didn't have the plug in for firefox, so I watched the blog video and launched the radiohead site in IE. Turns out it wasn't loading correctly.