sugarenia.com

Dear Wikipedia,

don’t do that.

Users act by habit. Yours is a search-based service. You moved the search box (the single most-used element of your design) from the center left to the top right. You have a fluid design. People love 24” or even 30” monitors.

Do the math.

It’s a wonder users haven’t started a riot yet. If I were a hardcore Wikipedia user, I’d have started one for sure.

OK, I exaggerate. But you should have got used to it by now.

It’s my lunch break. I enjoy my lentils, while idly surfing around YouTube. I find this new hip-hop promo by the greek band Stavento. I hate greek music but Stavento is a secret crush of mine, plus they feature this amazingly beautiful and talented 16-year old. So I click on it.

I’m watching idly till I stumble upon the most awkward product placement I’ve seen recently. Like the porn flashes embedded to normal movies by Tyler Durden, it makes me cringe.

If you’re really anxious to see it, scroll to 2:45, up until 3:00.

Whut? NIVEA skincare products are now a trend between young, fashionable tweens? And they carry them around in their pockets? Who knew?

Seriously, who approves this stuff?

I hate to point out flaws. Seriously. I get disappointed when I do so because my New Year’s resolution was to be as positive as possible this year. Plus, I’m no perfect myself.

Alas.

So I will speak with facts for this one. No sarcasm, no bitterness, because I respect people’s work. I’ll leave the conclusion to you.

I’m firing up GMail to see that I got followed by the greek department of Tribal DDB, @TribalDDBAthens. Hey, nice! Tribal decided to go social. Since I love hearing about new campaigns and advertising website launches, I follow back. Curious, I click on the link given in their Twitter profile.

Gonk. First hit. Website doesn’t work without the www prefix – as expected by naïve me, even if mr. @hakmem disagrees. It’s just a small thing though, someone mistyped the link while creating the profile, so I go on typing the www, eager to see the site.

Website welcomes me. Well thank you! Quite minimal though. Searching for a menu or something that looks navigational. Woot, a button! It’s in greek and labeled “Client area”. I’m not a client, zilch. Paying more attention to the copy, I realise that it asks me to visit the international Tribal DDB website and select “Athens” from its menu. Whut? I’m a bit unhappy about that. However, I’m determined to find more about their work so I click anyway.

Link doesn’t open in a new page, that’s good. Yay, the site looks similar, I like consistency. Searching for the “Athens” link the greek website told me about. Nowhere to be seen and still, nothing too navigational there, only a bunch of gold copy that’s about awards and not linkable. It’s nice that they’re so successful, but I don’t really care about awards. I’m itching to see work samples. Where are they?

After some seconds, I realise that there’s an enter site link on the left. Sighing on that (and on the “This site is designed for 1024×768″ text on bottom), I click on it.

Damn! A new window. Bleh. It seems that they’re using Flash for their site, but I’m prepared for that, many advertising agencies do. Grinding a bit my teeth I click on the ClickToFlash banner and wait for the loader to finish, thinking the actual website is about to launch. Wrong. That’s an intro.

See that “Skip intro” link up there? Yup, me neither. It’s so pale over the white background it’s painful to look at. And I can’t click on the actual intro to go on. I decide to wait it out and after some (precious) seconds, voila! The actual website.

Now, that “Athens” link. Playing a bit with my mouse over the ever-revolving city list on the left I find it. Wait, what’s “Health” doing between Hamburg and Helsinki? Is there a city named “Health”? Never mind. I click on Athens.

Things are loading. That ever-revolving city-something list on the left is still moving – why? I’ve already selected a city. It’s starting to become too annoying but I’m blocking it out. My aim: work samples. Their menu: that.

I only have 1.5 or 2 degrees of myopia and I still have difficulty reading those menu options. Nevertheless, I click on Work. Meanwhile, the box that’s directly on the left of the menu keeps rotating empty blue cells. I wonder why for a brief moment but then I just click.

Yippie! The interface got larger, at last! Will see some screenshots. I see another revolving carousel and some lonesome logos. Naturally, I click on the carousel, on a thumbnail that tickled my fancy.

The text isn’t selectable but that’s alright. There’re some screenshots for me to check out, but they’re scaled down. I try clicking on them to see if there’s a bigger preview available, nope. I click through the available screenshots but I can’t see a thing. I click on the “view the site” link to see it in all of its glory. Yay! It works. Hmmm….

OK, back to the site. That’s a case study, so there’re three tab things with more info. I see the idea. I click on “Service” but I don’t find anything interesting. On clicking “Result” though, I get some interesting stuff…

“Undefined” alright.

So I leave this to you, dear readers: what do you think? Should I feel satisfied by this web experience? Did I achieve my aim? Did I learn something about this company?

I did. A lot more than you can imagine.

No amount of social media presence can fix a broken web image. Sure, you have a strong brand, a successful company, many happy customers. But seriously, this? I expected better, Tribal DDB.