Sprint: Plug into Now.

The purpose of this Web site is to... Well, it's hard to say, right? That's the main reason I chose it. No doubt people who stumble upon the site will ooh and aah at the sleekness of the product. After all, it's from Sprint. However, despite the beauty of it, this site was listed as one of the worst Web sites of 2008 on WebPagesThatSuck.com, and here are some reasons why, provided by myself and Vincent Flanders. (Click to see what he had to say about it via YouTube.)

For one thing, the navigation is unfriendly at best. The main site is cluttered with widgets that do not fit on smaller screens (definitely not 955 x 600 pixels). Worse is that in order to get to the widget on the bottom left, you have to use your mouse and shimmy yourself over there. Why not make life easy for people and allow them to scroll? If you go to another window or tab, the site automatically scrolls to the bottom right for you (so when you go back, you have to manually shimmy yourself back to the top left for the semi-relevant information). I don't really care about how useless the widgets are because that decision was clearly intentional, but the most important (if not only) important element on the page is practically invisible in the mess of pointless information.

Once you finally realize the only effective link is the "Take it to go with Mobile Broadband" button, our big question ("What is this?"), is finally answered on the new page, which features the sky view of a city. Little speech bubbles pop up randomly with equally random messages. When you roll over certain locations, bubbles follow you around, but still some popups are random, and the first time I was on the site I spent a bit too much time trying to figure out whether I was having a Beautiful-Mind moment or not. Again, it takes a lot of concentration to not focus on the city and actually read the blurb on the left, which vaguely defines the product and finally gives you a link to a purchasing page (which is a clear and concise subpage of Sprint - thank goodness!)

It's not that I don't think the two pages and their ideas are cool - I can picture plenty of people having fun "in the moment". But, as Flanders notes, the "metaphor navigation" is distressing. The creator obviously knows Flash, but as we have discussed in class, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Actually, all the important elements are there, but they are overpowered by the widgets on the first page, and the popups on the second. Never at any moment in time do I get a concrete sense of what the product is, so never do I want to purchase the product - which I still don't fully understand. Maybe a Sprint user would know better?

The site definitely has redeeming qualities. It's a mess, but at least it doesn't give you seizures. And the idea of always knowing what's going on at any second of the day? That's always been a hot topic. I'm sure males respond positively to the sexual voiceover. I definitely got a good laugh out of it when she said, "Feel free to touch it." Yep, that's what she said!

If the purpose is only to entertain, then thank you Sprint, you have succeeded. It is a very pretty site, and you let me play pong on a 50 x 50 sized widget. However, I think Sprint's goal is to sell me something, and based on the Web site alone, I am not buying.