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4/5/2004 - Listen to My Gripes About Audible.com

I've finally signed up - again - for the services provided at Audible.com. If you've never heard of them, Audible sells digital audio books that work with the iPod. When The first announced iPod compatibility I signed right up, but ended up dumping their service about 3 months later. Why? Their god-awful Website.

On Audible.com's Website every link is done with JavaScript and session variables are religiously used to track and time user's actions. This is the worst kind of e-commerce sites that cripples usability to satiate some upper manager's need to obsessively monitor site visitors. In user terms it means you can't:

The site ended up frustrating me so much that before I quit I was browsing Amazon, finding books and then going back to Audible to see if they had them. Sad.

But now Your Mac Life (hosted by Shawn King) has teamed up with Audible and is offering their archives only thru Audible's service. Audible is also offering a sweet deal on iPods that will allow me to get one for my mom. So I relented and signed back up, but not before asking Shawn King to pass a question to the guys at Audible about why their Website was so damn wretched. Shawn forwarded me this response:

These unfortunate experiences are the result of using Broadvision to power the site's ecommerce functions. We built the Wish List function to address the lack of bookmarking that the user mentions, but tab browsing and using Google as searches are features that we feel are a reasonable trade-off compared to the benefits of employing BV as our e-commerce engine.

Director of Public Relations
www.audible.com

I'm sorry but I disagree, it's not a "reasonable trade-off" at all. Audible should dump Broadvision and set up site that gives users a decent Web experience. I may grudgingly use their service, but I won't recommend it to anyone else till they do.

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