Master Chemical Corporation has proved their expertise with various new formulations and equipment over many years. Today, we evaluate the Master Chemical website for usefulness to End User.

PAGE TEST: (0 (out of 3))  In first view of the simple blue homepage you will see the Master Chemical footprint spans the globe.  Once you enter your continent you have a well organized home page divided into "Cutting and Grinding Fluids"  "Clean- Coat and Protect" and "Fluid Recycling Equipment."  This is a short stop and the second click brings you to the Cutting and Grinding Fluids page.  Now you must make decisions.  One option is to by pass up the drop-down menus on this page and take a chance on the Industry Solutions tab.  Otherwise, you can choose a formulation family and then identify a product by name within the formulation family.  This, of course, was quick and easy for the Master Chemical Webmaster to design, and is utterly useless to any new End User investigating their products.  

CLICK TEST: (-8 ) It's a long and winding road with a few dead-ends.  After two clicks, you can click on a button on the right that says [View].  That gave us a blank page and we are charging a point for that.  It turns out you have to select the product, and THEN hit that button.  The idea being apparently that this is better than the moving target on some of the other websites.  But it's not any better.  Assuming you mysteriously know what product is of interest to you by it's name alone, their are six clicks before you are asked to narrow your continent to a language.  How did you get this far in the wrong language?  Couldn't we do that at the start?  Two more clicks and you finally get the MSDS or a two page product sheet.  Too little, too late.

CHART TEST: (0 (out of 3)) No Chart, No Points.  We are unmoved by selectors provided for a very few select industries.

LINK TEST: (2 of 3) The MSDS and PDS links are available. They also provide you a separate link under Technical Information tab.

 CLASSIFICATION TEST:

Organization- Poorly organized selection page.  It's hard to score high without a chart, and starting by Product Name in long drop-downs and making two clicks to get past that is just crappy for anyone other than a current user.  It's really not even convenient for them to consider anything else.

Detail- A limited amount of details are available. Once you reach product data sheet you get some stuff, except what we were looking for - material and operation recommendations and warnings.

Uniformity- Uniformity is there and very little repetition.

Overall grade- (D-) MCC has everything the way they like it, and nothing the way you need it.  Annoying organization and click mechanics and a bridge that was too far.  The terrible thing is that metalworking fluids are central to what is Master Chemical Corporation.  Metalworking fluids are not an "also have this" product line.  Yet material and operation guidelines are largely absent and we really cannot select a product on our own without that as the starting point.  Who cares what kind of machine we are going to bolt it to or weld it too (Industry Guide).  We've never seen that criteria is a scholarly article on selection.  Another lousy effort from a major supplier.  Let the engineers design the website next time, and limit the marketing people to providing the pictures.  There might be some good stuff elsewhere on the website, but if there is, we are too tired to keep looking for it.