It has been a while since I had a good rant, so here goes.
This started with a compromise. I haven’t been feeling the best since early last fall. On top of everything else, I didn’t seem to be properly sensing the flavor of the loose, single estate teas (usually mail ordered from Upton) that I have enjoyed for many years. So, I decided to economize and buy popular brands of bag tea carried in the grocery stores.
The last box of Lipton had a sample of one of their Pyramid teas. It was pleasant enough, but not my proverbial cup of tea. Guess I am still an environmental chemist deep inside, so in addition to the flavor I also wondered about the packaging materials. The mesh bag and string appeared to be nylon, and the tag was some kind of plastic.
I am an amateur gardener and also committed to minimizing the amount of waste that goes into landfill, so I run a compost bin. This morning after checking my email, I fired up Safari went to the international Lipton site to seek information. They conveniently provided the URL on the outside of the sample wrapper.
OK, I guess you can tell where this is heading, a rant about web site design. The appearance was pleasant with lots of space, but they made me wait until a big splash screen image downloaded. Yes, I am still on dial-up. No, I don’t see paying for a constant high speed connection when I only need to spend an hour or two on the internet per day.
Once it finished, there was one of those Flash style drop down menus to pick your country. Then there was another wait while more graphics downloaded. I read over the material and located the questions about the product part, then read through two screens worth of FAQ, none of which at all addressed the question I wanted to ask.
So, I took the “none of the above” link to reach the feedback form page.
Now, I can see why the government and employers might need my date of birth, but why does Unilever consider it so important?
OK, I filled out the entire thing, then hit the submit button. No pride…
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Being [well] over 50 is funky enough, but I got an error that I needed to enter a valid date of birth!
I didn’t think they needed that anyway, so I made up several birth dates and tried to submit the form. Same thing, it didn’t like any of them! I picked them from month, day and year drop down lists too, so it wasn’t a typo thing.
This is the direct URL http://www.liptont.com/contact_us/contact_us.asp if you want to give it a try.
The graphics stuff is more often an ego statement by the designer who took all the Adobe training anyway. Why did they go to all that trouble, then publish a non-functional form?
Later:
It was bugging me, so I went back with FireFox and tried again. This time I got an error message saying that I couldn’t use a double quote (nor other HTML tag characters) in the message box. Once I removed them, it “took” — there I go using double quotes again….
Escaping such characters requires adding a single line in the Perl CGI scripts that I have used.
I still think requiring people to view all the marketing material before you can get to information is nasty. It is like if you were passing a store and found a wallet on the sidewalk, you go in and have to watch a promotional video before they will tell you the location of the Lost and Found department.
I would have liked to have seen at least one thing concerning the health of the earth amongst all the stuff promoting “hydration” and antioxidants.
