Any regular reader knows how smitten I am with my Mini. I've even ordered a new one. But the post-ordering process has been a huge let-down, given the nearly iPhone-esque expectations I have for Mini. The Mini website (www.miniusa.com for prospective owners or ol.miniusa.com for owners; ol is short for Owners Lounge) is pure advertising agency, flashy and slow Internet 1.0 garbage.
You have to have an 8-character password, for instance, when the standard for non-financial sites is 6 characters. (Of course, my new standard password is 7 characters, so I'm constantly having to reset my OL password. And right now, I'm locked out because I made three attempts with the wrong password. Locked out?)
The log-in is at a special web page, rather than letting you sign in at the front door that's easy to remember. The whole site is designed around what were probably really "neat" animations four years ago. But they haven't been updated, even to reflect the new model cars.
Worse, what was a great idea when the car was introduced is now just embarrassing: You can track the car you order through production and delivery. Sort of. Actually, what you can do is watch an stored video of generic cars at different stages of production. So you're not actually looking at or seeing your car, just getting a kind of pseudo alert designed to make you think you're seeing you car go through production. No email alerts. You have to check in manually.
More telling, when I finally get to where I could check on the status of my car, I got the following message: "According to our system check, you currently have the Flash plugin version 2 installed. To properly view MINI Order Tracking, please click here to update your Flash plugin to the latest version. If you believe this message to be in error, please CLICK HERE to bypass the system check." It's bad enough that the system developers didn't know how to validate the Flash plugin; they tell the user to figure it out and bypass the error message manually. But I think that, since Mini implemented this site, Adobe Flash plug-in has gone from Version 2 to Version 8! The message isn't that I have wrong version; it's that the designers of the site were so clueless they didn't think that the version number would increase!
One thing non-technology companies miss about the Web is that they view as a one-time commitment. So Mini probably spent millions of dollars with their agency designing this web site when the car was introduced in 2002. But they didn't set up a system to update the site and deal with new technologies. Wouldn't it be cool, I think to myself, if there were web cameras set up so I could actually see my car being built? Maybe the next Mini I buy, in 2012?
PS: Turns out my Mini has already been built and is "en route". I wish they'd tell me where it is!
After the iPhone comments, I figured this was about the Mac mini.
Oops.
Posted by: John S. | August 20, 2007 at 04:57 PM