Advertising Campaigns

AVA Colorado Rafting company creatively puts users in the raft to navigate site

This post is also available in Spanish

I am currently working on a multimedia site about the intrinsic connection between energy and water in America for UNC’s News21 project, and I have been perusing numerous water-related sites to get inspiration for my project.

One site I came across was that of AVA Colorado Rafting Company whose site mimics the feel of a person rafting from a first-hand perspective. Furthermore, rather than utilizing a boring horizontal or vertical navigational bar, they built the navigation into a GPS phone as if you were navigating your way down the river. Very creative!

There are several great elements going on in this site. I really love the deeplinks to each page since the entire site is built in Flash. Furthermore, I applaud the creativity by integrating the noise of the river and animations of fishermen on the river bank, dragon flies flying around the screen, and fish jumping in the river. The short video clip preloaders of rafters going down the river was also a nice touch.

On the other hand, I see several areas that they could improve upon to enhance user experience. First and foremost, they need a button to silence the sound of the river as it got quickly old and made me have to use the bathroom. Second, I wish the preloader clips weren’t so pixelated, as it hurt the realistic feel of the first-hand experience. I believe this could just be a quick change in the settings when they compressed the clips. Granted I understand the need to have small file sizes since they are used as preloaders, but they shouldn’t forgo quality for speed. Lastly, the bubble animation transition between the preloader and content was too decorative for me and could have been a simple fade out and fade in transition.

I noticed a small “For Slower Connections” button at the top, which brings the user to a static HTML site of the same content. While they cannot mimic the immersive experience of the Flash site, I might argue that, as a potential customer, I was able to more quickly retrieve the necessary information within the HTML site. Of course the Flash site had the “cool factor,” but is it effective?

Check out both the Flash and HTML sites and let me know what you think – do you like one more than the other or do you think it’s worthwhile to have both sites?

As a side note, they are currently active on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. They also keep their blog current with the latest rafting pictures and stories. I would definitely recommend a redesign of their MySpace page, and they probably should have been more consistent on their naming practices throughout the various networks. However, having multiple UPDATED presences is a great start!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Starbucks Love Project promotes philanthropy, creativity, and music in interactive interface
• II’s picks for 2010 Webbys – Interactive Advertising
• Providing HTML and Flash versions of same site … worthwhile or waste of time?

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