Cool products, bad website

Do Something Pretty just reminded me of Crumpler bags. (Yes, I know that website isn’t in English. It fills my RSS with eye candy anyway.)

I looked up Crumpler Canada and I have to say it is one of the most un-usable ecommerce sites I’ve seen lately. First, the landing page is done entirely in Flash. Fun aesthetic perhaps, but navigation labels that dangle and wave around when I’m trying to read them make me want to shoot them, not click on them. So, I chose a type of bag from the less-annoying lower navigation. This brought me to a Flash-html hybrid site where it’s not obvious how to switch the product category you’re viewing. You have to first recognize the cutesy drawings, without labels, that are done in Flash without any tooltip or cue at all about where they might lead to. I call this Mystery Meat navigation. Nobody trusts mystery meat.

Now about my surfing habits. I use Firefox with a plug-in that stops Flash from playing automatically. I have to click on each Flash object on the page in order to make it play. This is very handy given the crappy flashy advertising that takes over some sites. It means I can actually stand to read those sites. When viewing a site that uses flash for navigation and other bits and pieces that I might actually want to see, it’s not so handy. The thing is, if I’m not very interested in a site I won’t bother clicking that. I’ll just leave. I don’t know how popular this plugin is, but if you’re considering putting your site navigation or other important bits in Flash I think it’s worth further thought.

On a related note, Darren and Julie just released a Social Media Playbook and one of the things they mention is that ecommerce sites like this should make products easy to link to. I would tell you my favourite bag in the collection if I’d had the patience to find it and if I were able to actually link to it. Whoever built this site should read that book and a whole lot more on interaction design too.

Update: I only just realized that one of the examples they use in  the book is Crumpler. What can I say, except I was obviously skimming… and it’s strange to have the same company brought to my attention from such different means in the same day.