MyPulau – Consolidate Your Things
MyPulau (Pulau is Bahasa Indonesia for Island) is where you consolidate all your favourite things. My Friends, My Interests and My Buys help you stay in touch, organize schedules for activity groups you are a member of, and get your favourite brands to notify you on special promos and offers.
I. Landing Page
What’s Good :
- Nice to look design, almost..
- Flash News Section
- No confirmation email needed
What’s Bad :
- Mix language doesn’t help this site at all, the flash news is in Bahasa while the overall landing page is in English, more explanation for this at the verdict area.
- Typography for the registration explanation part really hurts my eyes, too small and choosing an almost blend-with-background color for their description doesn’t help at all. It is nice in design perspective but not in usability
- An odd way of registering by choosing one of Indonesian island and clicking “register here” in the pop-up window, why don’t they just automatically popped the register form when clicking an Island ? Again, nice in design perspective but a complete disaster in usability
- What the heck is my phone number for ? Phone marketing ? I didn’t use the main phone provider sponsor for this site which you can use for logging-in, so I think I don’t have any obligation to just put my phone number there which is not covered in their TOS and FAQ.
II. Features
What’s Good :
- All in one page with blog, videos,micro-blogging,shopping center etc etc
- You won’t have to reload everything to change a thing or two with the help of AJAX
- Share your status update to Facebook, Friendster and MyPulau*
- See status update for your friends in the same pulau with a very interesting graphic
- Set up your mood using a fast to load way, your mood is symbolize by weather condition
What’s Bad :
- Mix language again. The interface is in English while almost all content is in Indonesian. For example the mall/shopping center is a downloadable content store for Indonesian citizen.
- *There’s no update status to the provided social networking web option
- They provided a time zone selection but they use a compact definition for the time zone. Really, this is nice in design perspective but an utter fail in usability. I prefer a GMT based with the city name in it rather than this.
- That…bright…red…ugh…
III. Verdict
MyPulau, coming from a mobile telephone provider in Indonesia, is a nice effort to make a social networking all-in-one website for Indonesian based user.
Too bad, MyPulau is having a crisis identity with their language, a mix-match between Bahasa and English. This probably coming from Indonesian culture for applying a job which requires you to write your job application in English, while the employees and employer mainly using Bahasa in daily life work, hypocrisy ?
Okay, they provided a way to choose between English or Bahasa, but please, if your site is intended for Indonesian user, use Bahasa as the main language for the site, then English as an alternative option. All of my foreigner friend thought that this site is intended for International user with interest for Indonesia’s Islands. Realizing the main purpose only after they tried to register and found out that it need an Indonesia based phone provider number.
I love how they made thing simpler with the AJAX based navigation, but come on, why did they forget about the basic usability of the site ? Like the timezone way of selection and this :
Can you read the hovered link ? I bet you can’t :)
About Anangga Pratama
This guy loves to review WebWare/Web 2.0 Apps. Located in Depok, Indonesia and still trying to grasp the real feeling of Internet :)
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Category: WebWare | Tags: Social Networking, WebWare Comment »
