Attention to detail lost in rush towards "Web 2.0"

WHAT WAS ONCE my favourite site for quick address lookups, Maporama, has been redesigned using the latest web buzzword: AJAX. But the new site feels rushed and has annoying little bugs.

Top: the new -and nice- Ajax based map navigation
Below: the "e-mail map" function was broken, sending an empty URL

The old Maporama web site had a number of great features, among my favourite the ability to save maps to the "My Maporama" section, and assign "labels" to each saved entry, so for instance if you saved the location of your doctor's office in a Maporama map, you could label the entry "Mydoctor" and then simply return to your saved map by appending "mydoctor" to the "My maporama" url. The BBC called it last year "a clean and intuitive web site to use, with an impressive language selection and an even more impressive database of street maps around the globe". But the simplicity of the old site is gone as well, and new translation/usability bugs were introduced in the process.

After realising the site had a strange "new look", I found I was unable to log-in with my previously registered user name and password. I had to create a new account to log-in, and apparently all my saved map locations were lost in the site "redesign". Looking for clues I found that a press release explains what happened, at least in theory. Titled "MAPORAMA ENTERS IN THE WEB 2.0 ERA" (sic) it reads "Maporama International today announces the release of its new maps and itineraries website www.maporama.com and its entrance in the Web 2.0 era. The website has been totally redesigned, on the ergonomic level as well as on the technical side. The new interface, based on AJAX technology, brings to the web users new enriched functionalities, dynamic contents and a more rapid information display. Maporama International confirms with this launch its leadership and proves to its users and customers its technological advance on the market".

The new AJAX version allows -like in Google Maps- scrolling the map on every direction without needing a whole web page reload. This is a welcome change. However, features like the "My maporama" labels seem to be gone, and it seems that in the rush towards "Web 2.0" the developers missed a lot of little details. Exactly a week ago, I e-mailed the company and let them know about a number of errors, among them, the failure of the "Mail Map" function of including the map URL in the e-mail. I have one "mailed map" message in my GMail inbox as proof, were the e-mail received was empty, only showing a "http:///" url instead of the real map url. That error was fixed, but several little annoyances still remain.

Language often switches back and forth between English and French

Case in point: session cookies expire too soon, forcing the user to log-in again and again and again. What is the point? What are they thinking? We're talking about a maps site, not a "Home Banking" account. I checked an address on Maporama, a few minutes later I hit "back to map" and I'm presented with an error message in french: "Vous devez indiquer une ville, un code(zip) ou un état". What happens is that apparently the session cookie expires, and you must log-in again. The error message in French is followed by an English translation in the same line, with no punctuation in between. I know, I must be a nit picker. But these are little details that add up to the sense of frustration. This didn't happen in the old "Web 1.0" version, and makes me wonder if perhaps they rushed the project a bit too much in the race to reach the hyped "web 2.0" holy grail.

Subscribe to the newsletter... if you can. Form redirects to inactive host name

Another one: I log-in into the "My maporama" section -the log-in screen switches to French language- I still wonder why-, and under "Organise my maps" I can see three options "Display | Properties | Delete" none of which can be clicked on - at least on Firefox and the Mozilla suite successor, SeaMonkey. Thinking those were buttons suffering a bad case of the "microsoft IE-only HTML" syndrome, I try again with IE, with the same results. It took me a little while to realise what was wrong. The explanation was easy: since the maps in the "My Maporama" section were gone -I had to re-create my account after the site was "re-engineered to become Web 2.0"-, I had no maps in my "bookmark" so there's no links of saved maps to click on below each "column" -display, properties, and Delete are actually column headings, awaiting icons below them for each saved map entry. But there is no notice telling the user "there are no entries"!

So how is one supposed to add a certain map/location to the "my maporama" personal section? In the old Maporama web site, I remember the selection was labelled clearly, at least I didn't had to guess about what a certain function meant. In the new "Web 2.0" Maporama, the section is named "Record the map on your document" and its icon is the drawing of a 3 1/2" inch diskette. I immediately thought it referred to "downloading the map as a file", it never crossed my mind that "Record the map on your document" was actually the old option that added the map to "My Maporama". Perhaps they couldn't find competent French-English translators?

The Naming of saved maps is gone. The section could use some visual clues.

The whole move towards the AJAX "holy grail" seems to have left the web site in a slight state of disarray. For instance, you go to the English language version of the Press Contacts page, click on the link "Subscribe to our newsletter" and you get as a result a sign-up page with a form written in English, but all the menus around it strangely switched to French. Okay, no big deal, so this scribbler filled the form and clicked on "S'Abonner" which I can only guess means "subscribe", and what did I get as a result: an error, of course. It tries to send the form to host name FS2.EMV2.com, which did not resolve to DNS request. Thinking it might have been an error on my local broadband ISP I logged in via my AOL account and tried with AOL's IP address and DNS servers, getting the same results. Brilliant!

Clicking "back to map" shows error, apparently due to expired session cookie

The press contacts at Maporama have been e-mailed and asked about this destruction of the previous working web site, and I also let them know about errors like the "E-mail map" function not including the map URL. That error has been since fixed, but they didn't even acknowledge my message or sent any response.

The moral of the story for web developers: in the rush towards AJAX and the "Web 2.0" model, please try not to annoy your users by also changing the familiar look and feel and introducing little annoyances. Automatic translators often do a horrible job and do not contribute to the site's friendliness. Sometimes, it's better to take note of that old adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Or, at least, if you break it, continue providing the old version as well during the transition period.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to like about the "New Maporama". Scrolling on a map is much nicer thanks to the use of AJAX, but overall, I get the impression the new web site was a bit rushed. Finally, for crying out loud, if any corporation really believes that "customer is king", then it should ask its existing customers and web visitors what they think of the existing web site, before engaging in a total redesign that removes some features in the process.

And yes, I'm also thinking about the "New Netscape" snafu when I say this. µ