Critique: YourPlayTherapy.com

YourPlayTherapy.com

There's a wonderful site called Coding Horror. It sounds worse than it is, really. It celebrates badly written code, or obliquely designed interfaces, and the thinking behind them. While it sounds extremely harsh (and it can be), it does frequently remind its readers that we are all walking coding horrors. We've all made stupid mistakes, reinvented the wheel, and occasionally done something so dumb, we print it out, tape it up next to our monitors, and write Never Do This Again in big red letters on it.

Designers have their own horrors, too. This time, I'm sharing one of mine. It's a fairly stereotypical story of a designer given complete control over something for the first time in his (or her) career.

Background Information

YourPlayTherapy.com was part of a wider strategy promoting tourism to the Jersey Shore. It has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) as a little dirty, a little crowded, and very gaudy. Sometimes that's the charm, but for many people in NYC, Philadelphia, and DC (the target area/audience boundaries) it's not always the case. There was a push in include not just the usual towns of Cape May, Atlantic City, and Wildwood.

Promotions and ads all revolved around the idea of a short vacation to the shore as Play Therapy - a time away from home that's only a couple hour drive away, helping you relax and maybe keep from flipping out. There was a sand dollar-coupon drop, newspaper and magazine ads, tv ads, banner ads, Mini Coopers dressed up as bumper cars and, of course, the website.

Our clients were a board of businesspeople and local government officials (and a couple state government people) - if you are cringing now, it's understandable. While our direct client was pretty good, you can imagine how some conversations went.

Part 1: The Design

Though I mentioned this as a design horror, the design isn't where the site fails. Personally, I've grown somewhat unhappy with the design. Much of the design evolved as a product of the modular approach I had taken to building the site, and it serves well as a bright, approachable design that allows for a showcase of colorful art and photos. Would I design it the same way? No. Given more time, or less responsibilities at the time, it probably would've been better.

Part 2: The Features

We were able to incorporate a few cool features. The vacation planner is a cool piece of programming. The first question (what do you look like) sets an energy level and places you into a category to narrow down the choices for your destinations. The rest of the questions increase or decrease your 'energy level', picking your destination from the set and selecting attributes for your additional choices.

We didn't program the games - just art direction and asset prep. The clown balloon game doesn't get too many laughs (much like the real game, it's either stupidly hard or stupidly easy) but everyone loves the skeeball game.

Part 3: The Back-end

The back-end is what qualifies this site as my horror. Originally the site was supposed to have less content – so the entire site was controlled by a single XML file, which contained the info for the navigation, the URLs for the location photos, and the text description. Due to the modular nature (and I wasn't aware of lockroot at the time) and a general failure in the planning stage the file was often loaded 2 or 3 times per page. This wasn't a huge issue in the beginning, however as the site grew both in the content of the page and the page count, it became a problem.

A week before the deadline, my nightmare came true: I had to rewrite a large section of the site. The What to do in this town section was originally supposed to list 3 or 4 things to visit a town for. Now, we had to make each category a list of restuarants, hotels and the like which introduced logistical nightmares of its own. Should we put anyone on the site who asks? Local fixtures? Chains? Also, events now had to be added to each location page. The week before the site launches, not only am I pulling together content, taking location photos, retouching photos, and getting assets to the game programmers... I get THIS? I did something I'm not proud of – I decided to not do the right thing. I ignored the huge, overlying issue and decided to just cram in the new content, bloating the site further because, "I can fix it later."

Later never came.