I went McDonald’s website recently to look up the nutritional information for their Deluxe Brekkie Roll – which I have developed a soft spot for.

mcdonalds.jpg

The site has certainly come a long way since I last visited years ago. The current incarnation is without a doubt a beaut piece of Flash “experience” work. The transitions and animations are fluid and smooth – fun and sophisticated at the same time. Great love and hard work has been clearly invested in this.

On the other hand, the site does take a while to load. The waiting time is out into good use by the provision of instructions on how to use the wow interface.

mcdonalds-blank.jpgEight minutes into the “experience”, I gave up trying to find the information I wanted. I kept ending up with blank bubbles that look as if they should contain information, but didn’t. Many bubbles had very generic (and possibly out of date?) information. Often, there was no way to tell if the site was loading information, or none was actually forthcoming.

Do I like it? I want to like it. It is slick and very well put together. But it was useless from an information retrieval viewpoint. It is but a toy with some superficial brand messages. The focus was clearly on providing a wow experience.

Maybe the Flash content was just too hard to update? Maybe the distractions were deliberate – look at the fun baubles, don’t think too much stuff about us or our products?