This is a website critique.

My cat is rather choosy, and FancyFeast is the only brand of cat food she appears to like (and even then, she doesn’t seem to like the seafood flavors). Nevertheless, she is getting rather heavy and I wanted to see what the nutritional content of her food was. So I navigated to fancyfeast.com, expecting to find this information fairly easily.

FancyFeast has a very nice looking site. The graphical content of the site matches their brand image, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are some severe usability problems:

The first thing that greeted me on their website was a Flash intro with audio. Audio-by-default is always a bad idea, but no problem… there’s a skip intro button and it’s not too loud.

Then I get to the main menu of the site. It looks reasonably well-laid out at first. I was looking for information about the food itself, so I clicked “Feast”. Ack, there’s another Flash video! And there’s no skip button this time!

About 10 seconds of pointless video go by, then I’m finally presented with three options: Poultry, Beef, or Seafood.

I click on Seafood, although I was hoping for a table that had the nutrition info. of all of the different types of food on one page like most restaurants have. Another 10 seconds of meaningless video and I’m left at another menu page: “With Gravy”, “Without Gravy”, or “Dry”, with about five different products in each category. *Shrug* Ok, let’s try “Without gravy”, “Flaked”… another video… finally! Individual products! Now I can get the nutrition info for them!

I clicked on the can marked “Flaked Tuna Feast”.

Nothing happened.

Clicked on the other cans.

Nothing.

Clearly, the nutrition info was not here, so I tried the “Satisfaction” link on the main menu. The music came back again, along with a bunch of random verbs that popped up and faded out seemingly at random. One called “Know” popped up, and I immediately dove after it before it could disappear, thinking it might have had information about their products.

A page popped up with the rather bizarre headline: “She lets me know what makes her feel good.”

It was at that point that I chose to leave.

Lessons to learn from this site:

• Center your design around the information that visitors might be interested in seeing. They visited because they’re looking for something.
• If you use audio on your site, start it muted.
• The maximum number of links a user should have to navigate through to get to any useful content on the site is 3. And even that’s a bit generous.
• The transition between these pages should be instant or near-instant. If the transition takes more than 3 seconds, it is too long.
• Don’t place usable-looking links to useless content. Clearly separate what is just “fun” on your site with what is actually usable. That means words like “Know” should probably not appear as links unless they point to knowledge.
• The most important sections of a site should be the ones that are most emphasized. The “Anticipation” and “Satisfaction” links are not important enough to merit top-level headings.