rant whine 'splain espouse: Download.com Videos

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Download.com Videos

Yesterday afternoon we launched Download.com Videos, a new section joining Software, Music, and Games. So far there are over 500 videos in categories such as Extreme Sports, Animation, Movies & TV, ESPN, Music Videos, and more. Five hundred may not seem like a lot, but considering we only had 90 days to develop this whole beast from designs to publicly launched beta product, that's pretty good.

This was a little challenging for me, and I'm not particularly enamored with the design of the section, but I had less than two weeks to do all the design, and a lot of changes had to be made during the development process, all the way through last Friday night. Aaron, who's the product lead, heard more than a couple "Fine, I can live with that"s from me. He's no stranger to the phrase, it being the mantra he had to adopt when creating Download.com Music about a year and a half ago with a fraction of the functionality he wanted to see on it for launch.

The main problem for me was that the Videos category came to fruition about 3/4 of my way through the overall Download.com redesign project, and I had to hurriedly fit in this new section.

Fitting its tabs into the UI was not a problem, since I had been warned to keep plenty of room for new tabs so we could expand into other content areas in future, but now I had to design this whole new section from scratch, right in the middle of crunch time finishing all the rest of the site's designs. So it came out looking rather hurried to me. But hey, it's beta.