Pottermore

Pottermore has been in Beta for a while now, but public opening is fast approaching, so here are some of my thoughts on the experience.

Like many other Potter fans, on the 31st of July I sat hitting refresh on the Pottermore site until my chance to find the magical quill came. I was lucky enough to only have to wait a week or so before I was allowed access to the site.


I initially tried it out on my iPad, which was a bit of a disaster. Parts of the site require you to use the keyboard, which I couldn't do, while others required a distinction between hovering and pointing, which totally doesn't work on an iPad either. Points off for accessibility, dudes.

I didn't like the limited choice of usernames. I ended up with ErisedSnidget149, which although it has a certain cuteness factor to it

Some parts of the experience were awesome. The highlights for me were definitely choosing my wand (or rather, having my wand choose me) and getting sorted. There was also some nice new information, such as the biographies of McGonagall and the Dursleys.

But on the whole I felt a little let down. There wasn't nearly as much of the new information as I'd expected. I realise that a lot of it has to be saved for future books (both in terms of needing stuff to release with those and to avoid spoilers for people who are looking at the site on their first read-through). But still, the actual process of going through all the chapters only took a couple of hours - for all the buildup it was really quite a small site.

Once I'd finished all the chapters, the only thing left to do was brew potions. I found this too frustrating to really be fun. A lot of the ingredients were too difficult to control with the mouse, so it was too hard to pour the correct amount out of a bottle or avoid dropping things in the cauldron while trying to put them in the mortar. Plus you have to let the potion sit for about an hour and a half, which meant I had to be really careful about when I started them. I imagine it would be even more limiting for kids that have limited time on the internet.

There is also a wizarding duel activity that sounds exciting, but it was down for maintenance by the time I got around to trying it, and as far as I'm aware it hasn't been back up since. I assume that it will be up in time for the official launch, but it doesn't look like there's going to be much opportunity to test it.

Overall it was an interesting concept and I enjoyed trying it out. But it didn't really live up to the hype.