The Tagworld song contest is live and you can now vote on submissions. I’ve got a lot of problems with the webpage:
- You need to register to vote
- It seems that the voting system is somewhat broken (when I logged in for the first time I was told that I’d already voted for 6 people and had 4 votes remaining… I hadn’t voted for anybody, I just registered).
- Why can you only vote for 10? Who does it hurt if I vote for 100?
- When I voted in Firefox, I got a weird pop-up that looked like an error message and said ‘9′. Did that mean I had nine votes remaining?
- I apparently can’t change my vote once it’s been entered.
- There’s no indication of how many songs have been submitted.
- You’re only shown a small number of songs at once. It’s very hard to find a song that you like because you can only see ten at time sorted alphabetically or randomly. You can’t skip and you can’t search. So, if you’re looking for a song by a band starting with the letter ‘Z’, you’re going to have to spend a LOT of time searching. I’d be seriously surprised if the winners all started with the letter ‘A’… it’s just easier to vote for them.
- There’s no way to link to a song you’d like to encourage people to vote for. If I found a good song, all I could do was tell you the name and force you fight your way through the lousy interface to find it. Why can’t I send someone a link that would let them vote for the one song?
This would be a lot more user friendly if we were provided with a full list of all submissions. I don’t need to see the band’s cover art, just show me a long list with the name of each band, the name of their song, a way to play the song on that page, and a way to vote. Don’t limit the number of votes I get, or at least allow me to change my mind once I’ve voted. If you have to place the songs on different pages due to the number of submissions allow people to link to individual pages and individual songs, and add a means of skipping quickly between non-consequetive pages, or add a search feature.
So, yeah, I’m underwhelmed by the voting process. I was expecting more.
Boo to Tagworld. You’ve still go time, you can make this better.
UPDATE 4/20/06 at 10:00am - it appears that TagWorld has made an effort to fix some of the problems, they now list how many songs were submitted (425) and the system that counts how many songs you’ve voted for is not broken in a DIFFERENT way. Here are the new problems:
- The voting system is broken in a new manner. I had voted for one song, which it said correctly. When I voted for a second song, the counter for the number of times I’ve voted jumped to three, don’t know why.
- When you click on the play icon for a song it just brings you to an error page. You can’t actually listen to the songs. Bah.
- The ‘Random’ sort isn’t random, every time you load the page in ‘Random’ you get the same ten songs. I suspect that a vast majority of the top 25 vote getting songs will start with the letter ‘A’ or be in the first group of 10 ‘Random’ songs.
All I know is that if there’s a significant number of songs in the top-25 that are not directly Snakes on a Plane related, it’s going to be disappointing.
Also, people are complaining in the comments about songs that were submitted but not included. All in all, a real coup for Tagworld. But, you know, the bloody failed kind.
Yeah, I can’t even get any of the stupid songs to load.. I guess they wanted to rip off myspace’s bugginess too.