When does your brand Be*come a barrier?
Only a week has passed since one of the most significant design faux pars of recent times launched.
In that time a wide range of press and interested parties have slated the website www.bethere.co.uk as an horrendous example of design gone bad.
In our usual pragmatic style we have decided to review it from a customer point of view rather than cast our critical design eye on it.
Q. So what do the general public think?
A. Not good, in fact with the odd exception the site has been universally criticised as being the worst redesign of the year.
Many a true word Twittered in haste.
Our favourite quote on Twitter is:
“If I didn’t know that the new website was for real I’d think it had been hacked to be honest!“
That’s pretty damming and more recent quotes are questioning Be’s ability to provide a good broadband service based on how poor their site is.
So how did the Be brand become such an anchor?
Only Be’s marketing team can answer that one and I guess the agency who created the site, which offers a number of very similar designs for other clients, only not quite so 80’s.
Pointless dynamic help
However all of these negative, and no doubt expensive, reactions and customer feedback could have been spotted, corrected and mitigated by simply asking their customers during the design phase.
Customer’s views count, get them before they get you!
As a user centred design champion, we are always looking for good and bad examples of sites that either choose to embrace or reject their customer’s views during the initial design phases.
Again I can not know if the site was tested prior to launch, but I have a hunch that it wasn’t otherwise it would not end up looking like this.
Brand and usability go hand in hand
Finally, an even bigger problem is that the site just does not work very well. There are prompts in forms that aren’t needed, readability is a strain thanks to over saturated colours and the accessibility is so bad I don’t know where to start.
The bottom line makes good reading for agencies like us, who are here to help businesses meet their customers needs, whilst working with big, brash design companies, creating brilliantly branded, usable and accessible websites, first time, every time.
If you want to Be better than your competition and avoid upsetting your customers then contact us to see how our research and user centred design services can work for you.
Be*en There Before, in the 80's
accessibility, information architecture, interface design, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface
I can’t agree enough. It’s a shocking example of creative agency blinding the client with fluff and ideas, whilst completely ignoring the customer and what they want.
Why, why, why did they not bother to show their customers the site? They could have just asked a bod in the street and saved a lot of pain. Yuk, Yuk Yuk!