Lots of people are blogging this week about the new Monopoly All-Ireland edition and encouraging people to vote for their counties as only 22 of the 32 counties can appear on the board.
So I headed over to the site yesterday to cast my vote for Antrim, where I was born and bred… and i have to say, it’s an awful site!
Eoghan gave a well-received talk at BarCampDublin last weekend on basic web usability – making your sites easy to use and navigate and using standard conventions for links etc. Well I have to say that the monopoly.ie site breaks them all!
First things first, I arrived there simply wanting to vote. I scanned over the page quickly (image below) and the following three things came to mind…
- My eyes didn’t even register the boxed links on the top left (boxed in yellow on the screenshot).
- The first thing I really registered on was the ‘Vote for your county’ section (boxed in pink), so i ran my mouse all over there, but nothing in that area is a link!
- Finally I returned to the top image, this was actually an animation that took about 3 secs to load and run (boxed in blue).
So where was the voting link? Study the image below and then scroll down to see the answer…
Yes, the main voting link outside of the menu bar was the little red sign at the end of the animation:
What the hell? It doesn’t even look like a link!
This morning when I clicked on the voting link all I got was a database error… They seem to have fixed that now, but I have even more problems with the site, to be honest…
On the next screen they ask you to vote by clicking on your county on the map… When the map loaded, I was presented with the following screen – see how pale and difficult to see the close button for the overlay instructions is?
Finally, I get to the voting screen and I am required to enter my details – name, email address, age… I go to type my email address and look what appears when I try to type the @ character on my keyboard…
So suddenly my keyboard input has switched to American? Oh come on Hasbro!
Finally, I chose not to vote in the end… Just as I was about to click the cast vote button, I noticed the following text:
I have read and understood the terms & conditions, & agree for the information to be shared with a 3rd party.
What freaking 3rd party? I don’t want my details passed on! So I clicked on the terms and conditions link and what did I get? A page cannot be found error!
So please don’t vote and don’t provide your details to this company – god knows what will happen to them!
Although I arrived directly on the voting site from Conor’s link, I found it difficult to get rid of the first info screen blocking the voting form too, and got annoyed by the weird @ problem as well. You’d think that they’d have money to get it right. I still voted, but with my special spamcatcher-email account…
Posted on April 27, 2007 at 11:38 am.
A horrible flash site?! Who’d have thought.
Posted on April 27, 2007 at 1:29 pm.
Are you all stupid? Seriously. Leave your firefox bubble for two minutes, and hey presto, you can vote and use the @ symbol. imagine that…….
If your going to do the whole “I know computers” thing, then maybe you should take the time to actually, I don’t know, learn about computers and browsers.
Posted on May 7, 2007 at 1:06 pm.