Fetch 4 Dissatisfaction

I saw an interesting advertisement last night while watching the Simpsons. A guy is walking out the front door of his house with his hockey bag over his shoulder and a he does, his wife uses this small bottle to spray this fine mist on him. He turns around and says “Forget hockey. Let’s go out and buy you some new shoes.” Then, you hear this sexy voice say “Sway…”. There are two more similar skits and at the end of the ad the overdubbing voice note that “wouldn’t it be great if there was such a product?” and that if there was, “wouldn’t it be great to go somewhere to get more information?”

The ad is promoting a new Canada Post service called Fetch, which is trying to allow privacy skeptics to get more information on a product without the fear of giving up their info directly to the product manufacturer. A consumer simply looks for the fetch logo and then uses a keyword to get more information anonymously. It seems like a pretty neat and useful idea.

The execution, however, is a completely different story. I have yet to see a Fetch logo anywhere other than on the ad last night. This morning I signed up for Fetch, thinking I would be able to try it out, perhaps with a real product or at the very least with a fake product. That “Sway” product would have been a great trial. Instead, there’s nothing. And I tried lots and lots of random keywords, even ones that relate to the advertisers they claim are using Fetch. Alas, nothing.

So here I am, excited to try this out, and I can’t. All I can do is register. Will I come back? Not sure. Depends on how long it is before I see a Fetch logo somewhere.

Oh, and the other poor thing about Fetch’s execution is that every page on their website asks me to login. Which is fine. Except that I already HAVE logged in. So once logged in if I click on the “About” there’s a box on the left asking me to login. Same with the privacy page. And if I want to get back to the page which shows me actually logged in, I click on “home” right? Nope. The Home links asks me to login (or register) also. So to get back to my logged in page I either have to log in again or click my browser’s Back button over and over and over. Nice.

According to a Canada Post press release ”fetch is the result of three years of work between Canada Post and its development partners: Sun Microsystems, Pulse, Impact Mobile, CGI and Innovapost. By working with these industry technical leaders, Canada Post was able to incorporate innovative, interactive technology with the stability, performance and integrity of a 150-year-old company.” That said, I’m thinking that perhaps an extra week or two of usability testing tacked onto the end of that three years would have been worth the effort to reduce complaints like mine.

1 comment »

1. By Anonymous 4 months later:

   
   
   at the time you saw the commercial fetch was just trying to get recognition after a trial period. Fetch will not actually be released until later this year, try fetching again (or fetch the keyword "slice" right now) fetch seems like it'll be pretty freakin cool once it's actually up and running