Sometimes I come across a site and have to wonder what the designers, consultants, marketers, management teams and everyone else involved were thinking when they signed off on the project. The sting is that much worse when it’s a re-design of a well-loved site.

Well, the brains behind the new BBC iPlayer layout have failed, miserably! The new design is cluttered and lacks the wonderful functionality of the older sidebar. Its ease of use is completely gone in favour of… something? I have no idea what benefit the new layout brings. There is no additional feature set. It doesn’t DO anything different.

I have two major concerns with it:

1. It’s cluttered.

The benefit of the original iPlayer was an ease of use and elegant design. It was simple to find a programme, easy to play it, and easy to find related content. They have now juxtaposed radio and television programming, littered the screen with unfathomable boxes, and made the filtering by category bloody difficult. Its main content doesn’t fit above the fold, making its screen real-estate poorly-used even though there is much more content on display at one time. The wonderfully-simple method of sidebar filtering is gone in favour of some myspace-esque scatter-box setup. It’s complicated, un-elegant, and supremely difficult to use.

Poor effort, badly done.

2. It’s ugly. I know this is subjective, but the actual player doesn’t fit well in its space.

Live Writer

Right, so I’ve been blogging using Windows Live Writer for a few weeks, and have generally enjoyed it. It’s easier than logging into my CMS, and it integrates with the site theme, so what I see is actually what the post looks like.

As you can see, it’s a pretty slick interface, and I think it’s  relatively simple, so the focus is on the writing rather than the application (Windows’ biggest design fault IMHO!) There are a few exasperatives, however:

• Insert Video only works with a select set of video sources, and I even had trouble with YouTube. It’s a slick idea, but it executes poorly.
• My Site favicon appears, which is nice, but it runs over ‘View Weblog’ and falls off the bottom of the window. Surely it’s not too hard to resize or align it in a satisfactory way?
• Set-up was quick, but there’s no native support for Drupal (you have to cheat and call it WordPress or MetaWebLog). This isn’t so bad, but it does limit the options you’re given if you choose the wrong one.
• It has the ability to tag posts, but it calls them ‘Categories’. They’re Tags. It’s a Blog. And, it’s one of the things that doesn’t work if you choose the wrong set-up type.

Aside from those, it’s brilliant. I use it all the time, and it is easy to use. You just have to html-in the videos you want.