It’s been a few days now since the relaunch of the Skittles.com website, and it’s been getting a huge amount of buzz for it’s groundbreaking use of social media in an official setting.
The only problem is, they’re doing it wrong, and they made a damn mess of it.
When I first heard the concept, I was very excited. I’m a huge fan of an openly social web, where the opinions and facts from people all over the world can help shape a brand. It’s clearly the direction the web is going, and a natural evolution from the early days of product reviews and recommendations.
As soon as I went to the site, however, I was repulsed, as it’s the laziest, most confusing implementation that I ever could have imagined. Completely different from what I was expecting, in every way.
The problem is they let the social content be the site. The Skittles site pulls in random social media pages (I’ve seen it pull Facebook and Wikipedia personally) in the background, while placing some ugly, huge floating nav over the top of the site. You can’t move this nav, you can’t hide it, and depending on which site it decides to pull, it can block the content behind it.
It feels like someone put this site together in about five minutes, not taking into account anything related to user experience, usability, or anything that a professional web architect should think of. It feels like a cheap viral marketing campaign, and yet it’s their entire web presence. Quite frankly, I’m grossed out.
Now, what’s the point in bitching if I’m not offering solutions, right? Well, here’s a solution, here’s what I was hoping the Skittles.com site would represent before I clicked on the link. Social commentary should help shape a site, you can pull in content and display it in a personalized, custom layout, without it actually being the site. How about you have a nice, branded Skittles page, and you have different feed boxes where you can pull Facebook’s fan page comments into, or a twitter feed. There are many handy tools for RSS parsing, and more.
So while I completely love the concept, the execution of this Skittles site is worrying. It’s going to put a bad spin on having companies use social commentary in an official setting, and to me that feels like a step backwards.
This blog belongs to Jade Rauenzahn, a 24 year-old web developer living in Hell's Kitchen, NYC.
Skittles (ie Agency.com) just pulled off a corporate carbon copy of Modernista’s anti-website.
Like most commercial regurgitations, the copy isn’t as good as the original – in implementation or intent.
Interesting… after checking out the modernista website I think I like the Skittles site even less. ‘Blatant ripoff’ is the phrase that comes to mind.
From my time in interactive marketing, I think that if Skittles were to have done this site as a marketing campaign, or some kind of standalone accessory website they would have had better results.
I wonder how long they plan on having this implementation in place, as the fact that the site requires you to fill in your age with every visit (they don’t have a ‘remember me’ option which spans across browser sessions) gets old quick. They obviously don’t want repeat visitors.
If this site’s to stay a while, they need to make some fundamental user experience improvements (at the very least).