Itunes University and Itunes store : unacceptable usability problems
Right now, apple dominates the educational podcasting market. But you wont for long if you don't fix the usability issues with the itunes university and podcasting sections of the itunes store. Apple has more money than the United States I have been told. Spend some of it on fixing your current software, not putting out new ones.
Specific problems:
1. The "power search" is a joke.
2. There is no way to filter.
3. I have complained many times in the past that the search results are unreadable because the column widths are too small to show any of the tittles…. I see that you have made a very sad and unsuccessful attempt at fixing it by making it 3 columns wide only when you shrink it to a very specific width manually.
at 1250px wide : 5 col across - UNREADABLE
at 1190px wide : 4 col across - UNREADABLE
at 970px wide : 4 col across, but now crunched together even more!! - UNREADABLE
at 965 wide - jumps to 3 cols at max allowable width - this is the only acceptable view. It is really terrible that you should have to shrink your window manually bit by bit to find a spot where you can actually read the search results.
There is also no reason why the search results cant have view modes such as "grid view - small" "grid view large" and "list"
4. The useless icons take up most of the search result space.
5. There are no sorting options for search results (most viewed, most recent, etc. There are only sorting options for specific subsections with set results such as "noteworthy section" And even then, it is the bare minimal options of featured, date, alphabetical.
6. There is no way to mark something as viewed / interested to make search results more effective.
7. There is no enforcement to have universities number the files so they show up in the right order on an ipod. (right now they show up in upload order by date which is not always the correct content order.)
8. There is no way to search for only audio or only video podcasts. or exclude video from the search results once you get them.
9. The quick view popup window takes as long to load as the page would.
10. It would be a lot more effective if the "filter by media" had checkboxes, allowing the user to include audio, podcast, and university, but to exclude music and movies.
11. It drives me nuts that all of the titles in the itunes store are cut off and have a ... at the end, leading you to believe that if you mouse-over it, it will show a tooltip with the full title. This is not the case. There is no reason you cannot implement that
Bad and frustrating.
12. In Itunes 10.5 for Mac Osx 10.6.8 snow leopard (downloaded software - not the itunes store):
When you view all of your subscribed and downloaded ItunesUniversity files, the list is stuck in "sort by release date". you cant sort them alphabetically or any other column header!
