December 30, 2007
Villain: Eye's Movie Listings
Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.
Instead of listing all of the films and theatres on one page and linking them to their reviews, like they used to, Eye's new dumb-assed online movie listings seem deliberately constructed to frustrate and confound the reader. The films can be viewed alphabetically or by genre, but the alphabetical listings are navigable only by page numbers (vs. the more logical "A-D", "E-H", etc.). There are thirty pages to sift through. The genre listings aren't any better: "unknown" is an actual category. The genres are also not cross-listed, so a film like Bee Movie is listed only as a family movie, even though it's also a comedy. Next to each film is a link to showtimes, but in the case of films playing at rep cinemas, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, it doesn't display when the film will play, only whether or not it is playing the day you are looking at the listing. Whoever green-lighted this redesign has got to be someone who hates going to the movies. Eye has felt unfocused and with very little substance print since its redesign, and it's weird and sad to see that lack of concern with content spill over into something as pragmatic as their online film listings.
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The whole Eye redesign was a massive failure. There isn't a single redeeming quality about it.
God, I totally agree. I used to use Eye to look up all films and it worked perfectly - clean, easy to read, easy to find stuff.
I actually got angry - like, actually ANGRY - when I went there and discovered they'd made it suck hard. Whoever did the redesign probably values "templates" more than navigation. Ugh.
Now where the hell am I supposed to find movie listings? NOW sucks almost as bad.
The new Now and Eye sites are both unusable. I used to make a point of reading through both publications when the new issues came online late on Wednesday nights, but it's no longer worth the trouble to ever visit them at all, for any reason. I think Joe Clark jumped the gun when he named the Metrolinx site the Failed Redesign of the Year.
I also used to use the Eye site as my primary source for first-run movie listings for about five years and recommended it to other people. Now, as Roxanne points out, it's bad to the point of being contemptuous and insulting.
Here's what I've heard via the grapevine: The paper's film editor and at least one of the web people fucking hate what's happened to the movie listings and are as embarrassed as you'd hope. Apparently they're hearing from a lot of people who are as disappointed as Roxanne. They try to explain the problem to the higher-ups (presumably those same brainiacs who canned John Sewell in favour of party pictures, and who have — as of this coming issue — scrapped Dale Duncan's city hall coverage in favour of slightly larger photos for "Devil is in the Details"), but the response is, "But now it's searchable!"
I'm starting to wonder if Eye is recruiting its management from the TTC.
There was a change of staff. The old site was the work of a smart benevolent dictator... on contract. Contract's over, not renewed (various reasons) and the site was redeveloped by the dangerous idiots at the torstar who brought you 200-character URL's.
Thanks, guys!
I created an account specifically to respond to this posting. I used to use the Eye's movie listings page religiously. Friday afternoon would be a quick perusal of both the complete listing of movies, as well as a quick rundown of the theaters on the way home.
And then one day Eye changed their movie listings to mimic the garbage on toronto.com.
Now it takes several clicks to get an individual listing, finding complete theater listings takes several steps, and lo-and-behold, it appears that my local theater in Richmond Hill no longer exists according to eye.net.
Not only that, but I'm pretty sure I know where the theater is that I want to go to, and if I don't, I'll ask thank you, I don't need a half-screen map before the listings.
If it's now "powered by tribute.ca" then I'm going to go to tribute.ca instead of coming here. In fact this is where I go now: http://www.cinemaclock.com/Toronto.html
Admittedly, I'm a little too passionate about this, as this is the only reason I went to the eye.net, but thank goodness I'm not the only one that has been irritated by this.
Somebody needs to explain to the folks at torstar digital that web 2.0 is about making things easier to use, not HARDER.
As the above-mentioned "benevolent dictator" (my reign: 1999-2006), I'm happy that people appreciated the old design of the showtimes -- it was a fairly manual and time-consuming process to keep them updated that way, but I was proud of the fact that they were by far the easiest to use (and, perhaps, most-used) showtimes listings in Toronto. Thanks, all.
Stanley: It doesn't seem terribly searchable to me -- if you want to find any of Donna Lypchuk's old articles, only an external search engine will help.
(And Stephan: my contract didn't expire -- I stepped away, 'cause they were itching to do this awful redesign.)