First, look at the URL. You handed this to be in my car where my only internet access is my phone, and you want me to type in this URL: http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/mcd/sustainability/sourcing/priority-products.html. You gotta be kidding me. Can you not take the time to make a vanity URL? Does McDonald's not own a short domain name already? This URL should ideally be something like mcd.com/sustainable (without the http since almost all browsers add it automatically). Even without a short hostname, at least use mcdonalds.com/sustainability (at the worst).
Next, the html extension on the URL. No web page on any modern site ends their pages with the html extension. This just makes the URL look like a GeoCities site.
Then I actually went to the site and found that the ridiculously long URL you made me type is a 301 redirect to another URL that is actually shorter than the URL you made me type. The new URL (http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/scale-for-good/our-food.html) is 67 characters, compared to the 81 characters in the URL you made me type. That's just stupid. But you still need to lose the html extension. The browser already knows. If the URL you gave me already is just a redirect, why on earth did you not make it a short vanity URL redirect?
Finally, chances are that if I bother to open this, it will be on my phone. For the love of thumbs, put the URL in a QR code so I can scan it. There are apps for this. Your staff can handle it. That way you can type the URL and I can just scan it. Sure, put the shortened vanity URL there too just in case I need to type it in.
There, I did it for you. If you have more that you need to do in the future, just fire me a note. I'd be happy to contract for your QR code generation.
Since this is all about technical flaws with the flyer, you may be wondering why I asked the provocative question, "Does McDonald's really care about sustainability?" Here's why: these technical challenges create usability problems for people ever reading more. This type of usability challenge introduces friction in the interaction that means that you have greatly reduced the audience that will ever read what may be a very important message on that web page. In the traffic funnel, you have just made the spout of the funnel so small that you have destroyed much of the value of ever handing out this flyer in the first place.
Marshall McLuhan proposed that the medium is the message. In this case, the medium is so flawed that the message I received is that McDonald's must not really care if anyone reads about their sustainability efforts or they would have made it easier to do. Therefore, this must just be propaganda. If that's not the message you wanted me to receive, then you should do better next time.
