NAYA bottled water
Topic
The site is about NAYA bottled Canadian natural spring water and the company that
produces it. It provides information about non-technical aspects of the company, about bottled water, and on the importance of hydration.
Purpose & Source
NAYA seems to be attempting to use its web site to give a positive image of itself to the general public of potential consumers and little more. The purpose is information and not entertainment.
The site is what I would like to call a Business site. It is set up and maintained by a commercial organization, but the site itself is not the product nor is it directly selling the product. That is, taking the purpose of the site into account, the source can be more specifically identified— in this case as a "Business" site rather than a "Commercial" site.
Target Audience
NAYA apparently expexts its web site to be serving primarily those teeming masses of internet users who want to know about NAYA the bottled water company, its history, the brand, the product, and its sources. The makers of the site might also reasonably expect to net some people who use search engines to find information on:
The target audience is obviously not people who wish to purchase NAYA bottled water, for there is essentially no information provided to aid this task. Basically, the site seems aimed at giving existing customers a reason to like the company that bottles their water even more than convincing people that bottled water is the best thing since sliced bread.
Content
The "What's new" page should be titled "Press Releases." This is more a content than a navigation issue because there is no needless intermediary page to click through that hinders efficient navigation. The page does immediately show a list of the two available press releases— that's the content problem: two press releases is all that's 'new'.
The most interesting content that the site had was quietly stated in one of these press releases: the company itself, Canadian success story NAYA, had been bought by foreign megacorporation on-its-way-to-being-a-bona-fide-monopoly Danone Group.
None of the content was dated, which is not good, but none of it was out of date, excepting that the history section had not been updated to include the information that a press release provided with respect to NAYA being bought.
In truth, however, the site contained a good deal of useful (or at least informative), credible content. On the more interesting side was the information on water and its uses for human consumption, sort of moderately interesting was the company's history, and on the less interesting side in terms of relevance was NAYA's sponsership of a Canadian kayaker. The main content problem was being incomplete by not saying where you can actually buy their water.
Site Plan & Navigation
The basic structure of naya.com is laid out simply. With only a few important pages, this is no great feat. Unfortunately, within the major sections the navigation involving the few subpages is not done particularly well.
For example, on subpages such as NAYA's awards
page the link back to the page that you came from is not advertised
as such, but is just graphical text as shown at left
with nothing to identify it even as a link. Furthermore, the name
the link is labeled with refers to the page, or particular part of a
page, that the user presumably came from and that the link goes back
to. Thus, the user would have to know and remember the title of
the page, or the section of a page, from which he came in order to identify
the plainish blue text, first, as a link at all and, second, as a link
that takes him back from whence he came.
In general, any page that is more than once removed from the main page is out of the flow of easy navigation.
"Where can I find NAYA" takes you to the list of countries
which has already been offered up twice through links called "30 countries."
I don't think it is a particularly good idea to link to the same page multiple
times from another page. But linking to the same page more than once with a link
of a different name is confusing. Furthermore, the phrase "Where can I find
NAYA" implies to me a site that might allow you to find stores in your area
that sell the bottled water. Instead you get a list of countries that you probably saw before by clicking on a link in the second
paragraph under history.
Going back to the complaint of incompleteness regarding the sites content, at the very last part of a section entitled "Quench your thirst" the site finally addresses the question of where you can purchase their product. It addresses the question, it doesn't answer it. "NAYA is here. NAYA is there. NAYA is everywhere!" represents all they have to say on the topic, plus that infamous 30 countries link. I consider all this sort of a run-around that ultimately doesn't give any useful information anyway.
The "Hungry for Life" link merely reloads the main page. Click on either one, both links do the same thing. Whether this is a content issue or a navigational issue,
its not good. It may well be that all it is intended to do is show you the "Hungry
for Life - Thirsty for NAYA" logo and, with Shockwave, animation (again).
The pages were generally long and required scrolling, but they mostly made good use of the location (#) tag to help users find the content they were interested in.
Links
No links lead away from NAYA. Not a single one. Rather insular and, more important, I suppose it ultimately hurts credibility when the user cannot go to a single external site to verify any of the awards NAYA has won, to get additional and confirming information on water and hydration, or even to learn more about Caroline Brunet, NAYA-sponsored gold-medal kayaker. Also, not having links makes it less likely that visitors will find something useful, and thus less likely to form a favorable impression of the company— which seems to be one of the main purposes of the site.
Page Design
There is considerable white space. Some of this is within the text and some is directly above and below it. Much worse, they put all the content inside tables set to 600 pixels rather than a proportion of the screen. What looks passable on my screen would have a nearly unpardonable amount of white space on a large screen. Meanwhile, the site would be annoying and hard to read on a very small screen. Other than that, the page design is not bad. There are no advertisement banners, which is a big plus. The decorations that form the backdrop for the navigation takes up considerable space at the top of the screen. And then the all-text and yet a graphic logo "NAYA: Canadian Natural Spring Water" takes up another 22 pixels in itself, for over 160 pixels gone right off the top. In general on my 800 by 600 screen I only get the first two paragraphs, or first six lines, of content on the first screenfull after the graphics mentioned and some useless pep-talk text (such as "Are you hungry for life? Are you thirsty for NAYA? Dive in to find out more!" on the About page). It doesn't look ugly on my computer, but it is much less "usable" than it could be and it is poor page design.
Creativity
The use of reasonably appealing graphics, generally of exercising people and their bottled water, is visually nice and reasonably creative. In particular, the use of a different graphic for each category kept each page fresh.
For example:
Functionality
The opening page assumes you're
ready for shockwave. However, there is a GIF version of the entire site, and it even was navigable with lynx, although the first screen provides no value to a text-only browser and simply must be hyperlinked through. Also, the link to the page on "Sponsorship: Team NAYA" is nonexistent to text-only browsers; the spot where it should be in the text has an empty pair of brackets.
At 39 kilobytes of graphics on the main page, download speeds would be approaching unreasonable. The superfluous opening page, meanwhile, is a 75 kilobyte image file. The Flash versions of all these pages are no doubt even larger. The large sizes are not limited to the main page: each page has a new, and large, graphic at the top and many have graphics early on in the text. With an ethernet connection their server moved everything in a hurry. With a modem the wait for each page would deaden the brain.
An interesting failure is that the Macromedia Flash pages (after the opening page) will only operate if the user's browser has cookies enabled. Otherwise one can click on the "Flash version" link as often as one wishes and essentially reload the page over and over again with no changes. Otherwise, the Flash sequences worked fine in relatively up to date versions of Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. It also downgraded passably, but far from perfectly, in NCSA Mosaic.
Unique Features
Well, I don't consider shockwave unique, so even though there was an animation on each page I'm not counting it as a unique feature. Sad as this may be, interactivity is pretty unusual for web site, so I would include most examples of it as under the "Unique Features" topic, but all this site had was a mailto link. Disturbingly, e-mail addresses are not universal for web sites; but, still, they are far from unique. NAYA's mailto (info@naya.com) was simply there and nothing more. It was fairly prominent on the opening page, played down on the main page, and not part of the graphical navigation tools on the content pages. What it did not have anywhere was encouragement to send e-mail, types of questions they would respond to, or anything to make the user think anyone cared.
Merci, I nearly forgot: the truly unique part of this site is that it is available in both French and English. Furthermore, the user may use a hyperlink at the bottom of every page to see the other-language version of that page.
©2000 September 13 · beMWeb
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