McCain – It’s all good

This promotion is not great. It starts with a pointless ‘Enter’ screen that sets the tone for the rest of the experience. If a consumer makes the decision to go to your site, you don’t present them with an obstacle.

After clicking ‘Enter’ I’m taken to a bizarre page that shows a forest with a flashing arrow and the text ‘Click and Drag’. Why would a user want to do this? Anyway, I do it and I soon discover that the ‘click and drag’ mechanism is just a contrived navigation tool taking me down a forest path.

This navigation system is replicated by an equally unusable and ugly spinning wheel containing the main links. You have to chase the wheel as it spins to try to click on something. The navigation options I’m presented with are: Farm Shop, Fair, My Place, Farm, Our Food and Competition. I’ve no idea why anyone would click on any of these links. ‘Farm Shop‘ isn’t a shop: it’s a product information section. ‘Fair‘ isn’t a fair: it’s a games area with a login requirement before you can play, but no indication of why a consumer would do it. There’s a button called ‘Play game’, followed not by a game, no, that would be too simple. It’s followed by an ugly overlay asking you to log in or register. When I do register, I’m not taken to my game. I have to click that again, and frustratingly I’m presented with the login overlay again! I patiently log in and still no game. I click on ‘play game’ for the third time and I get a ‘Conundrum Cracker’, with no conundrum in sight. It’s an anagram game on a fridge.

I abandon the game area and go to ‘Farm‘, which is actually a well-hidden recipes section. On to ‘My Place‘. This is an area where I can edit my profile and redeem the ‘Spud Shillings’ I’ve mysteriously somehow accrued. I click on ‘Redeem my Spud Shillings’ and instead of being told what I can redeem by shillings for, I’m taken to a very slow Catalogue section. I click on ‘HMV’ and I’m taken to page that lists vouchers for Waterstones, HMV and Paddy Power. I have 75 shillings , but a £10 HMV voucher is only a 1,000 shillings! Surely it won’t take long to achieve that? I begin to think that after all that clicking, all that poor design and user experience, I get to an interesting place. Now I have an incentive to collect these shillings, so I go back to the games area and play all the games. However, after I play them all, I still have 75 shillings…

So onto the competition. Users without Flash and JavaScript get through to a page I’m sure the developers didn’t want us to see [Update 12 Oct 2010: this page is fixed now]. It does look like browsers without JavaScript turned on can still complete the entry form, but it’s not clear whether they enter the competition as the screen just goes black. The ‘right’ way to do it is to click ‘Enter Competition’ in the Fair. I do this and I’m asked again for my personal details, despite being logged in! I enter them and I’m told that they’ll let me know soon if I’m the winner. I just wish I knew what I was winning.

I think the loyalty platform strategy underpinning this promotion is good, but the execution is clumsy and not thought through. The site feels like it was developed as a full Flash ‘experience’ site and then later split into chunks to help with linking and SEO.

It’s a shame because the McCain text promotions this summer were spot on: quick, simple and mobile-based. If this site is targeting busy Mums then it’s a long way off that goal.