Cormac Moylan

I’m in the market for a design tablet for use with my Mac. I did a bit of research by searching for discussions on tablets on a few design forums. The manufacturer name which kept cropping up was Wacom.

Wacom seem to be the market leader for tablets for both Mac and Windows. They have a large supply of both entry level and advanced tablets.

One of their entry level products, Bamboo, uses the tagline ‘uniquely intuitive’ to describe itself. Unfortunately the webpage which boosts and houses this statement is far from intuitive.

The minute I landed on the above page I said ‘WTF is this?’. To get to this page I clicked on a link from a ‘Products’ drop down list. I was expecting to be brought to a page full of information on the Bamboo product. Instead I was brought to a page of mumbo-jumbo design with very little text, no information and no obvious menu system to interact with.

Once I got over my initial disappointment I hovered my mouse over what looked like a menu in the header area. Firstly, the ‘font’ isn’t legible. Some of the words can be made out but ‘Buy Bamboo’ and ‘Share Bamboo’ are ridiculously illegible.

If you have visited this site you may have noticed that your mouse cursor no longer looks like a mouse cursor (*). It’s now a pen. Brilliant! How handy is that? Breaking standards one a time!

But wait kids, we have more standards breaking shenanigans.

Not only is their menu difficult to read and understand, it is completely delivered in JavaScript! This makes things very difficult for a whole host of people trying to navigate through their site. Firstly, the 5% of those of you who have JS disabled can go and whistle. Secondly, those of you who may have had difficulty in initially reading the menu are further hampered by a lack of both Alt Tags and Titles on the images. And thirdly, those of you who are search engine robots (hello guys) can ignore any possible deep linking by Wacom.

And finally to wrap things off.

If you’re going to go to the bother of asking me from which region I am visiting your site and also which language I am using, please do it correctly. I don’t remember saying that I spoke Englisch.

(*) The pen for the cursor doesn’t show in Firefox.

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