Wednesday 8 July 2009

Weetbix stuff up big time

And then it all went horribly wrong
In the final event, the Power Plays cards have created a viral level of buzz on Twitter - but it’s probably not the kind of chatter that Mr Andrews was anticipating.

A Twitter search for “weetbix” returns a hail of tweets by father, blogger, TV commentator and Datacom principal architect Ben Gracewood, accompanied by a blizzard of comments and re-tweets. It’s definitely gone viral, but the commentary is about as friendly as swine flu.

After NBR’s original article, Mr Gracewood left the message:

“The Power Plays website is an absolute abomination and whoever spent $1.3m on its development should be fired immediately.

Why? Let's see:
- Forcing my kids to register with their email and date of birth
- Requiring a confirmation email
- Requiring a download and install of an executable file
- Asking the kids to read a legalese EULA on the download
- Installing a second Microsoft C++ runtime library without asking
- Shockingly bad user interface on the plugin ("Camera Selected" button that when pressed selects a camera)
- The HTML Title tag on the webpage is "Splash". Google will never find the page

Whatever company they used knows NOTHING about usability, website design, or web marketing.

The website makes me angry. It makes me never want to buy WeetBix or be involved in NZ Rugby.

Shame on them.”

Mr Gracewood also waxed lyrical on Twitter, at one point summing up his experience with “F--- weet-bix”.

He relates his experiences trying to get the Weet-Bix cards to work, blow by excruciating blow, on his Ben Geek site and adds for good measure:

"F--- you Sanitarium. Screw WeetBix and screw the All Blacks. All 15 of them."

Mr Gracewood - who stresses he's putting his personal opinion - says Sanitarium was badly advised. As an IT professional, he points out that there are lots of much more simple augmented reality websites around, based on Adobe's off-the-shelf Flash.

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