Review: nowifeel.com, Sony

URL: www.nowifeel.com/

I stumbled across this site while checking out the weekly online award charts. Being a designer this site had great appeal to me as it gives you the opportunity to fill a blank canvas!

The site basically promotes Sony’s idea that their gadgets have a user experience like no other, and that their audio connectivity solutions make it easier to enjoy music anytime and anywhere. In turn Sony ask you to express how you feel about their gadgets by mixing colours, funky images and eclectic sounds. The expression is then uploaded to the public gallery where it can be viewed and voted upon then entered into a competition as a chance to win one of many attractive Sony gadgets.

The site itself has youth appeal, with its funky sounds and a vibrant colour scheme. I especially like the constantly changing background image on the homepage, which is a great example of innovative web design, and a feature that keeps the viewer interested.
A straightforward navigation is in place, also simple search engine and voting functionalities within the gallery section, ensuring the site is easy to use.

My favourite section of course is where you are taken to a blank canvas where you drag and drop text, images and sounds to express yourself. Many variants and adjustments can be made to individual elements, such as size, colour, and orientation. Great way to encourage creativity and uniqueness! Hours of fun!

The site is easy & straight forward to use, incorporates great fun through interactivity. One problem I found was that it runs slow on a low bandwidth Internet connection. I tested it on both fast and slow connections; the slow one took ages and was most frustrating, frustrating enough to want to give up. So all this fancy interactivity is very well if you’ve got the fastest connection going, if not it's very sluggish.

Functionalities used on this site particularly within the expression creation section, such as the drag & drop, I think would work exceptionally well in email marketing, a viral campaign where you could create an artwork and send it to a friend then invite them to create their own would be great to promote and drive traffic to a website.