An iTunes thread on Ars Technica inspired me to give the iTunes store a user experience spring clean – specifically, browsing TV shows.

Here’s the US store’s current presentation of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 1 (click to embiggen):

It’s crowded. Information is duplicated, such as the main season picture, the show title and season number, and many little details like “Genre: Comedy” (we’re, uh, in the Comedy section).

The episode list feels like a wall of text, unbalanced in density between name and descriptions, and doesn’t encourage you to browse and engage. And I’ve really tried hard to think of a reason why anyone would want to sort the episodes by time – the need for a column format is questionable, not helped by the column widths not being resizable.

Finally, it has some carry-through annoyances from the rest of the store, such as the incomplete breadcrumb trail – of course, that reflects a bigger structural issue.

So here’s my version, purposely an evolution rather than revolution (click to embiggen):

Notable changes:

• Episodes are visually larger with more implicit structure, and include full descriptions, a video frame, subtler presentation of metadata (time, episode number, etc.), and a clearer visual cue to try the preview.
• The breadcrumb trail is more complete – although Apple needs to make some additional landing pages in the site structure to fix the real issue. (An overview page for all ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ seasons is one example.)
• Lots of unnecessary wordage is removed. Customer reviews take half the space. Other seasons don’t mention ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ over and over. And I think most people understand the description without a big fat ‘Description’ heading (although there are good accessibility reasons for a heading).

I may work up a ‘revolutionary’ example. My mockup is mostly window dressing, apart from the experimentation with episode display.

The biggest problem with iTunes is this: it uses a relatively inflexible display approach for all its content – movies, podcasts, music, (soon) books, and so forth – and it’s really starting to creak and groan under the strain. Such diverse content types need tailored presentation to be fully engaging and successful.

(As an aside, remind me next time not to Photoshop up an example that uses a mottled blue background. That caused me seven levels of pain.)