What the Hell Did Target Do to Its Website?

Thanksgiving is next week, which means we’re barreling toward the time of the year when nationwide productivity falls off a cliff as everyone with a desk job starts cruising online sales all day, every day. Just in time for this influx of shoppers, AdWeek reports, Target has redesigned its website, and boy oh boy is the new homepage hideous.

Granted, it’s pretty common for big retailers to skimp on the website design front. Amazon is all business, WalMart looks like a series of stickers on a fake plastic laptop in an Ikea showroom and my God, have you tried to use Macys.com lately?

But Target’s redesign, coming from a company that’s supposed to be oh-so-design-savvy, is really something. With all the boxes outlining deals and specials, it’s like some unholy cross between Pinterest and a supermarket circular. There’s more information than one shopper can possibly process, including a sidebar that lists “ways to save,” including weekly ads, coupons, and something called “Cartwheel.”

It makes you wonder whether maybe Target accidentally reverted to a version from 2004. Perhaps the website’s back end ate the real redesign?

Then there’s the weird blocky font, which looks like it belongs on a Tumblr devoted to fanfics about, I don’t know, Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Also, there’s periods and asterisks stuck everywhere—sometimes even in the middle of sentences—like a toddler took a pack of polka-dot stickers and went to town on someone’s designs and the team just said hey, let’s roll with it, we’re on a deadline here.

But perhaps the worst is the fact that all of these little boxes outlined on the page has a little shadow underneath, as though this were some sort of children’s pop-up book.

The reaction on Twitter has not been positive:

But let’s face it: This won’t matter a whit for Target’s business because you still won’t be able to walk out of a Target without spending at least $50 on faux-mod picture frames you didn’t need.