Loves and Rantings: Halifax Facebook Holiday Profiling App

@RachelClarke shared this app http://t.co/hsR6tny just now and I really love it. Really funky, quirky little app - not something that I would associate with the Halifax brand.

The good bits

It got my choice of holiday right - I would indeed love to go to Mexico and I do happen to like spicy food
It reads Facebook data and creates something relevant from it - suggests a friend to take (people in my latest photo tags), suggests a book
It informs you about the country it's recommending
It's interesting
It's personalised
It's well designed and the functionality worked
It was easy to interact with and enabled self-selection of another destination - thus furthering interaction with the brand and deepening the experience.

The not so good bits

As Rachel pointed out in her tweet, the app 'over-does the produce mentions'. Agree. Promoting product is fine, after all sales are the final objective and reason why apps like this are created - along with creating fun experiences and providng a positive association with brands. 13 product mentions on one page though in anyone's book is overkill.

The call to action is not relevant in a hypothetical app and the copy does nothing to recognise this fact. The call to action to ORDER YOUR HALIFAX TRAVEL MONEY NOW! appears 6 times on the infographic style results page. I'm not a fan of call to actions with NOW! in - but even worse, in a hypothetical holiday choosing app, people are not going to be booking the holiday it recommends - so the call to action isnt' relevant to the experience. Sale of this product is connected to the next time people go on holiday and a more friendlier approach would be to address this.

The benefits of the product are not communicated until the second stage of the app. What % of people drop off at stage one without receiving the key message, only a demand to order the product. I'd imagine that click through isn't high due to the relevance of the call to action and the fact the experience ends at stage one. This is a shame as the second stage has a really friendly tone and great benefits of why to order travel money from the Halifax.

Definitely worth a go though - where does it take you? http://t.co/hsR6tny