We’re busy settling into our new offices in Uptown Seattle (part of the amorphous and vaguely snooty-sounding Lower Queen Anne). The day before yesterday was the first day all four of us were in the office together, and we got a chance to enjoy our new locale. For lunch, we ran up to Easy Street Records to catch a Mike Doughty in-store performance. Most of us are fans of Doughty (though I think Nick was mostly nodding his head politely) and Soul Coughing before that, and he and his band played a nice five-song set before we headed back. I guess that’s the first known example of our policy of not letting work get in the way of having a life.
Still, when you think about user experience, there are always interface issues to come back to.
Go to Easy Street’s site, and locate the list of in-store acts. It dates back to before Labor Day weekend, when the Bumbershoot festival was going on. The last act listed is from a week ago. I went to the site hoping to find upcoming artists I could plug into my schedule. Even better if they were in iCal or RSS format. Instead, I caught them with stale content.
It happens to all of us at one point or another. But things like in-stores drive traffic (measured in feet, not hits) to their store. If they were to do nothing else with their site’s interface, they should be keeping that content up to date, first of all, and secondly, they should be working out ways to make people aware of it. The site should link the performance with that artist’s music, so that people who happen to be browsing can find out when to see them live. And using the hCalendar microformat, they could tag each event on that page so that I could create iCal events on my own. They’re tiny steps, sure, but the right moves keep customers engaged, and that can sell a lot of records.
