Blog contest
Once on St. Patrick’s Day, when I was younger, I filled my refrigerator with 17 individual glasses of water. I had heard on the radio the day before, if you put exactly 17 cups of water on the night before, all the cups will all magically turn green when you see them the next day. I woke up the next morning and darted to my fridge hoping the Irish Leprechauns had dutifully kept their part of the bargain. But when I busted the fridge wide open I had discovered that the cups were all mysteriously gone. There was no trace of them whatsoever. Distressed, I trudged back to my room worried that I had not done something right, such as putting too many glasses (even though I triple checked the night before) and that I made the Leprechauns angry, thus giving me bad luck for the rest of the year. Later that day, during dinner my dad asked me why there were so many cups in the fridge that morning. After explaining why and being laughed at, I soon learned that my dad had poured them all out, and put them all in the dishwasher to dry. And so, despite my chagrin, my hope for good luck was restored and I was able to sleep that night, confident that no banshee would terrorize the 9-year-old me and take my soul.
-James Ramos
These last weeks have been simply crazy, and that’s the only reason I write this now, and not a moth ago. Anyway, it’s always good to think about crazy things, because that’s how crazy jokes are born, and today the time has come for a little funny story about a madhouse, the loony guys there, and some apples…
The story goes like this: in a madhouse, the doctor in charge wasn’t really happy about his patients’ behavior, so he decided to study the effect of various fruits on his patients. Once he added apples to their meals, everything became nice and quiet. He was extremely happy, and already starting to check their files once again, thinking about the day when some of them should be sent home.
Unfortunately, crisis struck, and funding has been cut. Not the crisis we’re been going through lately, just some fictional crisis…you’re aware this is only a story, right? Good, let’s continue! So, no funding, less spending, and no more apples.
One evening, when visiting his patients, the doctor noticed there was no light, and the light bulbs were all gone! Just as a side note, he also tried some cromotherapy, and the patients had yellow light.
“What happened to the light bulbs?”
“We ate those yellow apples, they were awesome!”
This surely gave our poor doctor a sleepless night, but he ended up using some red light bulbs he tried during his cromotherapy period, since red light usually gives headaches, and maybe that way his patients would become peaceful and quiet, once again. Unfortunately, there are also red apples, so it’s obvious what happened.
After a few days spent thinking about what should be done, the doctor had a brilliant idea – this time, he used green light! We also need to mention that the loonies were extremely irritated by white light, so using regular light bulbs was not an option. These being said, green light bulbs have been installed, and days started going by without any incident.
One evening, the doctor visited one of the larger rooms in the madhouse, only to find all people inside staring at the light bulbs around them, so he asked:
“What are you doing?”
“These apples are green. We’re waiting for them to ripe, we can’t eat unripe apples!”
Wikipedia on Skittles
YouTube on Skittles
Some of the shortcomings that I mentioned above would include the following:
- Stepping over the branding of the sites they are using. Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia are all probably seeing a large increase in traffic to their Skittles branded pages yet are having their logo overtaken by the Skittles® navigation bar and logo which seems rude at best. Most people that would be using Skittles.com to reach these sites however will most likely know what sites they are being redirected to and therefore the logos are not necessary. Perhaps they are still gaining after all as Skittles® is branding them as experts in specifics stations, ie. Media, Definition, Friends, Chatter.
- Losing all navigation abilities once the visitor clicks on a page. This I think is a killer to the ingenuity of this interactive idea of Skittles®. If you click on any video on the Media section, any Twitter name in the Chatter section, or essentially any other link outside of the Skittles® navigation bar, you lose the navigation bar entirely along with any chance of visiting another Skittles® subsection. Now, technically speaking, other than including some form of frames on the pages (akin to the way you view Google images that you’ve searched for), I can’t think of a possible solution to this one. Of course, adding the nasty frames to the page as Google does would make for a much less sleek display however it would allow visitors to actually keep navigating around Skittles®’ new ‘website’ which would make for much better usability.
- Perhaps a little confusing to those not familar with the web. Now, with the crowd that would potentially be visiting the website for Skittles®, I don’t know that this would truly be an issue but it should be brought up. Sending users to a different site altogether without more than a paragraph of explanation seems a bit confusing and potentially untrustworthy. At one point in time, the navigation bar offers an explanation that to get rid of it, you simply need to type in the address of another website, so they are recognizing that they may have some visitors that might feel hijacked by this technique. In a world where claims of viruses still abound e-mail inboxes, wouldn’t it be better to have a link to an explanation of how/why they made the change and what it means for the visitor. The only explanation displayed to the visitor is a short paragraph at the beginning shown simultaneously as they are requesting birthdate verification in order to proceed. This may cause the statement to go unnoticed entirely.
But what are your thoughts? Did Skittles® hit a home-run, foul up a potential good idea or did they just plain strike out?