It’s exciting to be at the inception of a new category of software experiences – branded ones to be specific. Needless to say, in these early days there will be many missteps for every step forward. Let It Out from the friendly folks at Kleenex represents both. Backed by a television advertising campaign, the folks at Kimberly-Clark are clearly committed to the site.

Conceptually, I think the site is a home run. It’s basically there to let people express their emotions. Kind of like a flickr for emotions with a dash of Post Secret thrown in. The notion that Kleenex tissues have a seminal role in some of the most emotional and important events in someone’s life is pretty powerful in my opinion. It gets at this core theme that almost everyone can relate to, and connects it back to their brand (one of those few brands that have come to name the entire category like Band-Aid, Xerox. etc.). In addition to all this, the site has a good domain name.

In these days where we’re shipping software every day, and just cause a site is out there doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to done, it’s important to recognize that sites may be works in progress. That said, the Let It Out really comes up short when it comes to execution. It’s a variety of issues which I’ll list below in no particular order:

• I don’t know any gentle way to say this, so I’ll just “let it out”. The site is just plain ugly. I don’t mean simple, or minimalist, I mean ugly. The font choices are haphazard and odd, it has no coherence, and it’s unattractive.
• The Kleenex brand is competing with the Let it Out brand rather than getting credit for the site. I read this as insecurity. The site should just be Let It out brought to you by Kleenex. Instead it’s confused… Half the time it’s trying to be it’s own site, and half the time it’s trying to be a subsection of the Kleenex product site. This is pure speculation, but this decision seems like it was made based on the org chart at Kimberly-Clark instead of based on what would make for a superlative experience. Even the URLs are wacky. They have this great domain name, but once you type it in, it redirects you to this monstrosity: http://www.kleenex.com/USA/Home.aspx?sectionID=2&s=letitout. Let It Out should be its own brand brought to you by Kleenex. Now it looks like Let It Out is a line of Kleenex Brand tissues.
• There’s weird unnecessary use of flash all over the site. There are these navigation mechanisms on the homepage to let you browse tags or themes of the content that people have uploaded to the site. They use all sorts of non-standard fonts, and use flash to render the UI. If you’re going to abandon accessibility compliance (which I don’t recommend) to use more interesting fonts, then at the very least make the thing searchable. Flash is great when necessary, but here it just wasn’t necessary.
• Speaking of Tags, they really should be a dynamic and evolving list reflecting the tags that people are actually applying to the content they upload to the site. Instead they are a static list (rendered in Flash) generated by the producers of the site. Also, when you go to an individual entry that someone uploaded, the tags on the item are not clickable. Lame.
• Not only is the Kleenex brand desparately trying to take over the site from a brand perspective, it’s also trying to take over the site and turn it into a product information site. The Kleenex folks need to decide. Is this site a product information site or a website that helps you share your emotions. Either is fine. A weird mix of both is not. It’s like they felt that they needed to justify the investment in the site by showing how they could drive users to their product information. That’s a bad strategy as it misses the point of creating a site like this which is accruing positive value to the brand.
• They include a report they commissioned from a market research firm called “Letting it Out in America: The Social Landscape for Expressing Emotions”. Fine. They present it in the form of a PDF on the site. I would understand taking little cool snippets of data and working them into the user experience USA Today chart style. But instead, they’re offered as PDFs so now as if the site didn’t have enough lack of focus, it’s also supposed to be the press room for Kleenex.
• There’s a Let It Out blog. But there’s no RSS feed. Let out your blog posts!
• The TV ads are great. They show so clearly that the folks who made them totally get the concept of the site. But the folks who made the site clearly don’t get the concept as they didn’t even bother to put host their own ads on the site (or if they did I couldn’t find them after five minutes of searching and poking around). I had to go to YouTube to find the ad.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Honestly, the most disappointing thing to me is how many of the issues above are so easy to get right. And I doubt it would have cost them even one more dollar to do it well. The marriage of high quality brand advertisers and high quality software developers is destined. I am quite sure that it will happen. But we’re still early in the courtship and it’s going to take some time to make it work.