When Upcoming formally became an official Yahoo! property two weeks ago, the user experience turned really sucky for me.
I was being recommended events that were of no interest to me, and more importantly I was missing important events that my friends were going to.
Despite the improved UI, I was really not impressed.
Well, today I discovered what my problem was. In Upcoming 1.0 I had my locale set to both San Francisco (where I live) and London (where I’m from). Crucially, San Francisco was set first, London secondly.
Well, during a casual browse of Upcoming 2.0 just now, I noticed that it had “London” written fairly prominently in yellow at the top of each page. What I suddenly realized was that it was treating London as my primary locale and so of course the events it was showing me were of no interesting – and it was hiding many San Francisco events from me too. Some SF events were coming through, but only the most subscribed – I’m guessing it’s an algorithm thing.
I can only assume that London was showing because the locale I picked last in Upcoming 1.0 was London and during the transfer that had (wrongly) been assumed to be my primary locale.
Changing this over was slightly tricky as it wasn’t immediately clear where locales are in Upcoming 2.0 – but clicking on my username at the top of the page and then finding the “My Places” on the left hand side of page got me to where I needed to go.
I guess the moral of this story is that bad things happen when you assume something about the user. Clearly, when the notion of a ‘primary’ locale was introduced to V2.0, the system really should have asked me/checked it’s assumption rather than make a guess in the background. Even more so if the impact of that decision has fundamental consequences for the successful use of the websites primary function. I had already intended to use Upcoming less, having found the new experience nothing like the old version.
Have others encountered this problem, let me know?
Yes. It wants to “have” me only one area of where I live. I have no problem with suggesting events for me that way, but that I have to clear out the search box EVERY frickin time to search for something global like Hamburg and not just Lübeck is so annoying.
Second the new UI – while nice for a casual user in its many words overview – is annoying to use due to not having a quick overview anymore of what is happening. I use upcoming to scan for events, add them and make travelling decision based on them, which is why my event list is so long.
Of course you could say I am not the typical user. Right. I am just one of the hubs and multiplicators of this for usage f.e. in Germany. Well, not anymore as this is getting unusable.
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