List After List… After List, After List, After List…

It seems like there’s a new “2.0” site being launched every minute, and a new “lists” site every week. Add to the fray the beta List After List. I’m really not sure what to make of this site. It seems like it has the potential for genuine usefulness – much like SuperViva, Listigator or 43 Places – but is currently missing the mark. There are plenty of lists, to be sure, and some of them actually seem somewhat relevant or useful to the general population. Unfortunately, most of the ones I ran across really didn’t look to be of real quality or usefulness.

There are a few other bothersome issues, as well. While List After List makes use of the ubiquitous tagging feature (helpful), the overall primary navigation model seems to be lacking. “Lacking” as in “next-to-nonexistent, aside from tags, random browsing, and direct searching”. This is… annoying at best, and problematic at worst. Also, the colour scheme. What is up with the colour scheme? It looks a bit like somebody decided to try mating “2.0” layout sensibilities with 1998 Geocities colour coordination. In a word: painful. (I don’t even want to think what it would be like to visit this site if I were colour-blind.) The final turn-off for me is the preposterous size of the monetizing ads; discretion was certainly not at play here. Are monetizing ads inherently bad? No. Many sites use them, and to great effect. But in this case, we’re talking blatant overkill. It’s the kind of obviousness that makes you wonder whether the site owner is more concerned with offering a useful service and perhaps generating a tidy little sum of passive revenue as a bonus, or whether they are looking to whore out a little bit of service in exchange for a hypothetical cash cow.

It may come across as though I am being unduly harsh, but I honestly believe the site can be improved tremendously in a variety of ways. Rectifying the issues I mentioned above would be a good start. Using web design best practices for the underlying code that drives the site would help as well. A bit of user testing – not just bug-hunting, but actual user testing – would be highly beneficial, along with greater consideration for basic user interface design. It’s a beta service, true, but it doesn’t need to come out of beta until these things are resolved. Hopefully, by then, they’ll have figured out their niche and trimmed the fat to narrow the content down to truly useful, worthwhile, relevant or amusing lists (note: consider peer moderating of lists?). That will be a good start to “making the Web a more useful place, one line at a time”.