We’re so damn sick of Web sites that waste our time with kitschy little games like “dodge the fruit” and a “break dancing with robot.” Someone sent us a link to this FiveAlive page called SuperCrazyAlive.
Apparently, Leo Burnett is behind it. We, on the other hand, are wholeheartedly against it (and most other sites like it). The reason? It’s completely pointless. And pointless is not OK. There are sites that do UX much better, such as T3’s Script Your Trip and Virtual Office, and another of my favs, YearbookYourself.
More after the jump.
These and other active UX sites offer the user something tangible — a product to look at and inspect, a fun game that relates to a product etc. YearbookYourself does an especially good job of this. The user uploads an image of him/herself, and chooses a high school yearbook template for his/her face to show up in. With cutouts from the 50s all the way through the end of the century, the fun lasts awhile — and the punchline is salient.
Similarly, Script your Trip and Virtual Office have a point — an endgame — a goal. On the other hand, SuperCrazyAlive wasted our time, didn’t let us turn off the music and gave us no way to easily exit the games we had finished. So to get away from the frustration we had to close the page. Upon revisiting, we found the “home screen” button, but it wasn’t obvious.
It’s hard to call lame UX sites “advertising” but at the end of the day, that’s what they are. In FiveAlive’s case, we felt a bit tripped out, bored, and annoyed that we’d never get those three minutes back.