Let Your Eyes Feel The Sweetness
A Sweet Journey to Hershey’s Website
Sweetness is abstract, chocolate is concrete.
On Hershey’s website, however, Sweetness is Hershey’s.
Once I opened Hershey’s page, what greeted me were pink, heart shapes and chocolates that reminded me of the Valentine’s Day without a boyfriend.
“Happiness is Hershey’s”
When I browse the official website of a brand, I am used to start with the brand story first.
Hershey’s uses outsized typography to emphasize a sentence the founder, Milton Hershey, said:
Obviously, Hershey’s core value, or core mission is to spreading happiness which is reflected in the design and content of its website.
Aesthetics
Browsing the official website of Hershey’s is like tasting a piece of chocolate with my eyes.
The combination of highly saturated warm colors and chocolate colors makes the pages look sweet and warm; almost no blue, green, and gray that make people feel cold or lonely are used.
Further, the font Hershey’s uses is round and cute. To match the theme of chocolate, all the text uses white background + chocolate color words or chocolate color background + white words, and there is not even a black text!
Hershey’s conveys the romantic and warm feeling through colors and fonts, however, it is not enough.
Chocolate is a kind of food. The food itself is meaningless and not emotional. It is just a thing that fills people up. Then, who endowed food a meaning beyond filling up? Human. It is people that give food abundant connotations and make food a vehicle for expressing emotions.
As we can see from the picture on the left, Hershey’s only uses product pictures rather than pictures containing persons. Such pictures lack visual appeal and it is difficult to establish an emotional connection with customers. Because, compared to the chocolate itself, the feelings and emotions that people convey through chocolate are the crucial reason for the enduring appeal of chocolate.
On the contrary, portrait photos look vivid and energetic. People’s facial expressions and body language can be regarded as the visualization of taste. Photos containing food and persons can arouse people’s resonance with delicious food, to achieve the effect of making food more attractive.
Let’s see another picture. The girl’s smile makes the chocolate cake look more delicious, doesn’t it?
Content
On Hershey’s website, there are more than 400 recipes. Don’t worry about too many options. Recipes can be filtered by celebrations, types, flavors, total time , and skill level. For example, if you want to make a cake with milk chocolate for Christmas, there are two recipes:
All recipes, without exception, lay emphasis on sharing with family or friends during holidays.
Moreover, in a prominent position on the homepage of the website, Hershey’s has set up a special area for S’more, a kind of campfire treat that is widely popular in North America and is the overwhelming choice for gatherings.
It is apparent that Hershey’s hopes to tell the customers that in addition to being eaten directly as snacks, its products can be used as ingredients for other desserts. Hershey tries to describe a scene to the customers: accompanied by the aroma of chocolate, all the family members made delicious desserts together. Then they sat around the table, sharing cookies or cakes. In this way, not only the application of the product has been expanded, but customers also appreciate “Happiness is Hershey’s” in the process of making and sharing desserts.
Exploring recipes was supposed to be the most interesting part of the site, but Hershey’s used the most boring way to show it. No videos, no interactions, only pictures, and words. Aren’t such interesting recipes worthy of a better presentation?
Uninspiring Is The Biggest Feature of This Website
Indeed, Hershey’s website is well-structured and easy to use. The homepage is used to display recently promoted products, and the tabs at the top of the page can help users navigate to pages they want to visit.
Its online shop is designed in a Amazon-like way, simple but well-arranged.
But I have to say, it is too ordinary and unattractive.
First, except for link buttons, there are no elements on the website that can be interacted with.
Everyone who visits a brand website has a certain purpose. For me, my purpose is to test the UX of Hershey’s official website. To help customers achieve their goals is the most basic function of a website. How to keep customers on the website longer is what the brand should pay attention to. Adding interactive elements is a useful way to improve time on page. Coca-Cola sets a good example. Brand websites can hardly avoid using a lot of static pictures to present their products. Coca-Cola made a small change to make static pictures interesting: when you put the mouse pointer on a picture of Coca-Cola’s product, the picture gradually gets bigger.
Second, Hershey’s employed responsive design but just copied the desktop version to the mobile devices, regardless of user-centered. Take the product page as an example.
The mobile version is acting the same way as the desktop version by using a format that pictures above, text below. This format leads to a waste of space that only two products could be accommodated on a screen. If you want to browse more product, just scroll down and down and down until you feel tired.
If the mobile version can be slightly changed, putting the picture on the left and the text on the right, not only can present more products on one screen but also display more product information.
Third, Hershey’s has not tried to innovate its website, let alone using AI technology.
The Conclusion
To sum up, Hershey’s website is disappointing.
Hershey’s tried to convey the core value of the brand through design and content but in an uninspiring way; it accomplished the basic construction of website but forget to show the brand’s fascination.
Website is not just an online shop, it’s a channel to tell your brand story.
