Essence 30 Dates in 30 Days Airs!

You can check it out on Essence’s website. I am glad I finally got to watch it but disappointed overall. Coming from Essence which is such a huge brand in the African-American community I expected so much more. I kinda feel like they took the easy way out.

Review:
I expected and actual “minisite” to be separate from the Essence.com website but still have some sort of promotion on the main site for the webisode present. I think if there was a domain such as 30dates30days.com (Note: It is available) it would brand the webisode and possibly spin off and become a webisode series, very possible if done right I think users would be very interested in something like this. As far as the interface I really though each Bachelorette was going to have its own where I could navigate all things about that Bachelorette. It does that now kind of but is still very much disconnected, say I go to Nicole’s blog. Because it is hosted on Typepad and not on Essence’s website there is no navigation for Nicole’s “page”, I have to use the browsers back button just to get back to where I was or go back to Essence’s homepage. This is similar for Nicole’s photo gallery, once there I have to use the side navigation to go back to the Bachelorette landing page from there I have to click back on Nicole’s page. So I guess I just expected it to be more usable.

I also expected to actually be able to buy Nicole’s outfit (I really like the dress). Not sure why I thought that, oh yeah that’s because that’s what it says. Well you can’t, not interactively and online at least. Her outfit and designers are listed but they are not even linkable to their respective websites. Integrating e-commerce into this experience could have benefited the experience as a whole even simple linking to Leopard Print Shoes at Nine West. Not sure if those are the ones she wore but you get the point.

As for the video, I really liked everything about it except for the length. I though it was going to be longer then 5 minutes and 39 seconds, a little more like 30 minutes so we could all really get a better sense of the date other then what the participants said. I found it hard to form an educated opinion on my thoughts of the date in just 5 minutes. This could possibly make it hard for users to discuss and interact with each other on their website which I am sure is one of Essence’s goals.

As the internet becomes the medium of choice for many other forms of media such as Newspapers, Magazines, and Television will have to evolve and really understand the internet and what web users want. It can be a challenge because the internet is so dynamic (vastly different from the print medium) and users want so much more then just a static page these days.