Disney.com to redesign, again
Cory Bergman June 25th, 2008
Disney believes its recently reworked Disney.com looks too corporate, so it’s getting another redesign. I found this paragraph from the NYT story interesting: “It is also no accident that video search pages will look similar to those of YouTube: Disney designers worked to incorporate certain YouTube hallmarks, figuring that kids had grown accustomed to viewing Web video in that manner.” Interesting, huh?
10 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | June 25th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I hope they abandon the 100% flash architecture… Those kind of sites are getting really old, bloated, and especially annoying. Most features previously achieved by flash can be achieved via AJAX these days… not to mention how impossible SEO is with flash.
2. Safran | June 25th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I will say, as someone who has been planning a vacation there recently, it is damn near unusable. Slow to load, error prone, Mac unfriendly. A classic case of design over ease of use. Try to find a simple map of the place. Try to figure out the price of a hotel. Try to figure out which restaurants are in which parks. I wound up using Google, Fodor’s and Disney “rebel” sites to plan the vacation.
When you put in how many people there are in your group, it steers you in odd directions. (There are five of us, and it put us in a room that sleeps only 4.) You put in how much you want to spend, then it steers you to a room that costs twice as much. I had to enter my kids’ ages twice and my travel dates twice - every time I wanted to check out a different hotel.
They have a baffling meal plan that was inscrutable on their site. I put up a question to my Facebook friends to help me with that one.
Pare it down, Disney. Plug-a-roo: Wrote about it at my blog. Click my name.
3. discreet_chaos | June 25th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I hope they lose the “boys” and “girls” because in this day and age, such labels should no longer be appropriate and I have to wonder if demographically, “Cars” and “Toy Story” really appeals more to one sex or the other, anyway.
4. Safran | June 25th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
PS: Eventually I called them to book the vacation because it was simply impossible to get the information online. Think that’s a good business practice?
5. Rob | June 25th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Saf: True Story. A co-worker comes back from Promax and e-mails out a synopsis today of everything he learned. He highlights lessons learned about the web among other things and I read over his comments and write back “Who held this workshop, Graeme Newell or Steve Safran?”
Well … you know the answer since you were there.
He said he stumbled into your meeting but stayed and found a lot of great ideas which he forwarded on to our staff today. Hopefully we can put those ideas into action.
6. Rob | June 25th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Oh … back on topic … YouTube hallmarks? Not even close. YouTube is clean, easy to navigate, and doesn’t have main landing pages where a video with audio at Ozzfest levels blasting the second you open the page. And yes we get it, Wall-E is a movie coming out this summer. No need to have a whole site takeover when you go to Disney.com. Complete turnoff right there.
I booked a three-day to Disneyland recently and while the park site is better than Disney.com - link in my name - it could probably use some cleaning up. You really don’t need to put every nugget of information on the homepage. Unless its an explanation on why they got rid of Mission to Mars and changed 20,000 Leagues to Finding Nemo.
7. db | June 25th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of confidence in their redesign. Like most companies, the fundamental problem is not the end product, it’s the process they went through to create it.
I doubt that Disney woke up and said, “oh, maybe having that Flash wizard in promotions design the site wasn’t a great idea…” They probably just went back to the same people that did the current site and said, “hey, make it like YouTube!”
8. Anonymous | June 26th, 2008 at 2:28 am
YAY! IE7 told me a script either on the site or in the survey applet was threatening to halt my computer!
Second try was better but typing and the resultant DELAY made me feel like Foster Brooks FOR REAL!
9. Anonymous | June 26th, 2008 at 2:30 am
PS It’s my 42nd birthday and I was VIRTUALLY DRUNK AT WALT DISNEY’S.
10. Anonymous | June 26th, 2008 at 2:32 am
OOPS! Anonymously virtually drunk…the internet is finally cool!
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