Brand Failures

Internet and new technology failures 251
through the use of Flash. However, many Internet users did not have a Web
browser that could support this technology. Furthermore, in 1999 most PCs
had a 56k (or slower) modem. This meant that the graphics-intensive site,
which, as well as the attraction of Miss Boo offered visitors the chance to
‘rotate’ items before making a purchase, was going to be somewhat slow. How
slow Well, on an average computer the home page could take around three
minutes to load and that was after having to sit through a lengthy animated
introduction. Oh, and if you had a Mac you couldn’t access the site at all.
Small wonder that the leading Internet usability experts, such as the highprofile
author and Web engineer Jakob Nielsen, quickly pounced on boo.
com as the archetypal example of how not to build a Web site. When he first
reviewed the site for his Alertbox newsletter in December 1999, Nielsen
could hardly believe what he saw:
Instead of making it easy to shop, the site insists on getting in your face
with a clumsy interface. It’s as if the site is more intent on making you
notice the design than on selling products. Furthermore, it is simply
slow and unpleasant. All product information is squeezed into a tiny
window, with only about one square inch allocated to the product
description. Since most products require more text than would fit in
this hole, boo requires the user to use a set of non-standard scroll
widgets to expose the rest of the text. Getting to a product requires
precise manipulation of hierarchical menus followed by pointing to
minuscule icons and horizontal scrolling. Not nice.
Not nice indeed. But then, Alertbox was only distributed to ‘techies’, not the
highly fashion-conscious affluent consumers boo wanted to reach. So why
worry too much when they had already managed to secure complementary
articles in the UK and US editions of Vogue, alongside various newspapers
Ironically, the company founders’ undeniable talent for publicity was
starting to turn against them. Having spent millions on advertising and
having generated thousands of column inches in the press, expectations had
been inevitably high. While the company succeeded in creating a young and
hip image (in 1999 Fortune magazine picked it as one of its ‘Cool Companies’
of the year) it had also placed itself under too bright a spotlight. Alongside
attacks in the Internet media regarding the site’s functionality – or rather, lack
of functionality – the mainstream press was also starting to pick up on the