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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Poor Design: Apple "New Episode Available For Download" Emails

So this is the first of a new series I'm going to start which is centred on instances of less-than-ideal design. Not always bad, just less than ideal (or poor) design.

This example is just like when someone sends you an email saying they've got a message for you. It would have been just as hard to send you an email giving you the actual message but they want you to do something first ... An unnecessary step.

Here's the example from Apple;


What I find infuriating about this is that it doesn't tell me what the new episode *is*. Is it an actual new episode or is it another "making of" documentary of some description? The only way to know is to take a look in iTunes or on the Apple TV.

There's plenty of space. Why not include it?

What adds to the frustrating is that I've been an Apple customer for quite a while and I could have sworn they used to. A little digging around in Gmail (thanks Google!) unearthed this old emails from 2012;

This just makes it more annoying. Apple "Series Pass Notifications" used to include this information.  I wonder what made them stop?

Either way they've taken a once fairly useful email and turned it, not into something useless, but into something of less use for no discernible reason.