So I’m thinking about going to Joe’s Crab Shack for dinner. They just opened up about 20 minutes from my house, and I figure it can’t hurt to have an alternative to Red Lobster for quickie seafood.

I google them instead of just typing in joescrabshack.com, because it’s a 50-50 chance they’ll have some different domain name (I just talked about this in my Choosing & Using a Domain Name teleclass, so it was on my brain, but it’s not the subject of this post, so I’ll close the parenthesis here).

I get to joescrabshack.com with one click. This is the last easy thing about this visit.

Strike one: I am immediately bombarded with the site’s soundtrack of ocean-wave noises peppered with seagull cries. Thank god they’ve provided an “off” button for the sound, which I find because my cursor moves over it literally on its way to shut down the sound for my entire computer. Next to the off button are buttons labeled 1, 2, and 3, with the 1 highlighted. So they think some people are going to come to the site and actually want to make this noise LOUDER?? Hey, if I call my mom with this website in the background, she’ll think I’m at the beach! Not!!

I’d like to take a look at the menu, mainly to see if they have macaroni and cheese for my kids, since that is the single restaurant item I can be 100% sure that they will both eat (as long as the cheese is yellow and there are no specks of herbs/veggies/what have you, that is), but also to see what the grownups can expect.

Strike two: There’s no “menu” button on the site’s main navigation system. They are all cute things like “Surf Shop” (I guess correctly that this is where one goes if one loves the shack so much that one simply must have a Joe’s t-shirt), “Beach Bum?” (which turns out to be their career opportunities page) and “Beach Front” (I still don’t know or care what this one was, because clicking on it gave me a popup that Firefox thankfully blocked). Also, all the navigation buttons have mouseover javascript or flash animation that doesn’t do anything useful, just joggles the button a little lower. That’s annoying, but not a dealbreaker.

I tried “Know Joe” because I figured that might be some kind of “About” page with menu information. Instead it’s the folksy history-of-our-chain page. Maybe interesting on another day, but where’s the damn menu? The “Sand Box” button led me to the kids page, which at least contained the kids’ menu…but only as a downloadable PDF! Arggggh!

There’s also a bottom-of-the-page navbar with DIFFERENT (though slightly less cryptic) names, one of which is “Eat.” Surely that’s the menu? No, it’s the locator page. Huh? Oh, I see: The bottom nav links to the same pages (well, mostly…) as the top nav, but they all have different names!

I finally begin thinking enough like a middle manager to realize that they may link the menu to specific locations, and give in to typing my zip code into the locator (helpfully, and that’s not being snarky, located at the top left of every page), which leads to…

Strike three: The letters ZIP are actually the default text for the field, so I have to hit backspace three times (or I could have highlighted the letters and deleted them with one click, but I’d already put my cursor in the box immediately following the P, because I thought this field worked like a normal user-friendly input field!) and then type a zip, because ZIP90210 is not a valid zip code! And no, I don’t live in Beverly Hills.

I finally get my local restaurant, and there are two buttons: “Details/Shack Shots” and “View Map.” I don’t want either of these things, I want a freakin’ menu! But when my mouse goes over the Details button, a tooltip flashes that says “view menu.” And even though I have to click AGAIN, on a little menu image on the Details page, at least it’s not a PDF. So I can finally view the food and the prices, even though it’s broken up into several separate pages that are cryptically titled (On the Bun? I guess this means sandwiches, but I’ll probably never know).

By this time I’m no longer hungry for seafood, so the menu examination is cursory at best. Pun intended!

The only way this site could be worse is if there was a gigantic splash page upon entering, and maybe some blinking text…oh, and a flaming logo. Joe’s marketers, take note.

Did it ever occur to anyone at Joe’s that maybe one of the reasons someone might visit the website would be to look up the menu? Nah, they’re too busy selling t-shirts and admiring the flash graphics. Maybe they’re hypnotized by the soothing (cough, snark, cough) ocean wave soundtrack.

Since I’ve spent so much time whining, I’ll provide a prescription for improving the user experience on this site.

• Ditch the sound. Period. If you must have sound make it OFF by default and let the user click a button to turn it on. Then watch your website stats to see what minuscule percentage of users actually do this, and decide to ditch the sound, period. Side note: Even the “off” button is broken — most pages in this site respected my selection, but when I visited the “Surf Shop” section the sound came on again, every single time.
• Skip the annoying flash graphics that drop all the buttons and the thatched roof and the compass and the stereo speaker graphics down onto the page…with a BOUNCE, no less, EVERY SINGLE TIME someone goes to a new page. Once, MAYBE. Every single time? Gimme a break.
• Make “Menu” or “Food” or something equally obvious (sigh… even a cutesy “Joe’s Grub” or “Grub” might work) one of the main navigation tabs. Then include links to this page in all the other places one might look, like the “about us” page. EVEN IF the menu tab goes straight to a store-locator page (where you fill in the zip code or city/state), and you include some text to the effect of “please find your local Joe’s to see your local menu,” that’s STILL better than hiding the menu within the local-store area and NOT TELLING US WHERE TO LOOK.
• Label things what they are. Change all the cutesy titles to regular understandable-at-first-glance words. “Beach Bum?” is cute, but “Jobs at Joe’s” tells visitors what the heck they’re clicking on and STILL manages to be alliterative. Why should I have to click on something to find out what it is?
• Make the top and bottom navigation bars either consistent (same names, same links) or complementary (different names, linking to different pages). Ideally, the top and bottom navs would be identical (that’s consistent), but if you have too many main sections for a top nav, fine, put the less-important stuff on a separate, clearly-labeled bottom nav (that’s complementary).
• Make the ZIP field user-friendly by having the letters disappear as soon as someone clicks on them. It’s not rocket science.
• Don’t use PDFs for your site content, unless it’s as an alternative to your regular HTML content. For the kids’ menu, I can totally see downloading it to print out for your kids (my daughter walked by as I was writing this post, and got all excited about the word search, so I’ll be doing just that). But I want to be able to glance at it on your website first before going through the hassle of downloading.

I have now officially spent far too much time dissecting this. Joe’s, you should send me a gift card! As for tonight, we’ll probably go for Mexican food. I’ll keep you posted.