Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [95]
One of these headaches related to the heavy use of Flash software, which enabled the site to be animated. Indeed, one of the key features of the site was the virtual shop assistant Miss Boo who was only able to come to life through the use of Flash. However, many internet users did not have a web browser that could support this technology. Furthermore, in 1999 most PCs had a 56k (or slower) modem. This meant that the graphics-intensive site, which, as well as the attraction of Miss Boo offered visitors the chance to ‘rotate’ items before making a purchase, was going to be somewhat slow. How slow? Well, on an average computer the home page could take around three minutes to load and that was after having to sit through a lengthy animated introduction. Oh, and if you had a Mac you couldn’t access the site at all.
Small wonder that the leading internet usability experts, such as the high-profile author and web engineer Jakob Nielsen, quickly pounced on boo.com as the archetypal example of how not to build a website. When he first reviewed the site for his Alertbox newsletter in December 1999, Nielsen could hardly believe what he saw:
Instead of making it easy to shop, the site insists on getting in your face with a clumsy interface. It’s as if the site is more intent on making you notice the design than on selling products. Furthermore, it is simply slow and unpleasant. All product information is squeezed into a tiny window, with only about one square inch allocated to the product description. Since most products require more text than would fit in this hole, boo requires the user to use a set of non-standard scroll widgets to expose the rest of the text. Getting to a product requires precise manipulation of hierarchical menus followed by pointing to minuscule icons and horizontal scrolling. Not nice.
Not nice indeed. But then, Alertbox was only distributed to ‘techies’, not the highly fashion-conscious affluent consumers boo wanted to reach. So why worry too much when they had already managed to secure complementary articles in the UK and US editions of Vogue, alongside various newspapers?
Ironically, the company founders’ undeniable talent for publicity was starting to turn against them. Having spent millions on advertising and having generated thousands of column inches in the press, expectations had been inevitably high. While the company succeeded in creating a young and hip image (in 1999 Fortune magazine picked it as one of its ‘Cool Companies’ of the year) it had also placed itself under too bright a spotlight. Alongside attacks in the internet media regarding the site’s functionality – or rather, lack of functionality – the mainstream press was also starting to pick up on the parties and high living centred around the boo headquarters in London’s Carnaby Street.
Malmsten now maintains that the company’s extravagant reputation ‘masked the reality’ of the sheer amount of work that went on behind the scenes. Indeed, he reckons the 24/7 commitment his staff (or rather, ‘boo crew’) devoted to their task especially around the launch period, hadn’t been seen since World War II. ‘To understand this kind of total devotion to a cause you probably had to be in Britain in about 1940, when car factories were turning out aeroplanes or tanks overnight,’ he writes in boo hoo, with no apparent trace of irony. But however hard everyone in the company was working in November 1999, the atmosphere had changed by the following February.
According to boo’s financial strategist Heidi Fitzpatrick morale was low. ‘We were out every lunchtime getting shit-faced. There was no management and we all went home at six instead of working all hours.’ The reason for such low morale is represented by the figures.