Mission On is…Off

So I read Bernard’s eviseration of the Mission-on Website, and the debacle of spending over $10m on a useless flash monstrosity. The best part was his daughters quote:

“Oh My God,” she yelped. “It’s all in Flash. I just never use Flash sites. You can’t navigate them, they’re usually just so crap. My browser is set to block these yucky pop-ups. No. No. No,”

The next best part is the site.

It doesn’t work.

Is that because Bernard has sent it too much traffic? Is it because I am on a mac? in Australia right now? Who cares – it doesn’t work, and for $10m+ that’s a pretty basic error.

Here’s the site:

Ugly huh?!. Nothing, nothing at all is clickable in that page. My manic attempts at clicking eventually resulted in this:

The authors of this monstrosity are Clicksuite, who unlike their profit producing site, actually appear at the top of a google search for their name.

Bernard and daughter were particulalry scathing on the excess use of flash – and interesting Clicksuite have blogged about a new searchable flash player that will be made avaialble to search engines. Sadly it isn’t a cure-all for trerrible usability, nor even SEO.

To be fair to Clicksuite, a design is only as good as the less good of the people doing the design and the client driving the design. So I am nt sure where to place blame, and for $10m I guess a lot of companies woikd take some embarrassment. (I’m looking at those involved with Ferrit as well here)