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Shitty web sites...
Jun. 5th, 2015 03:53 pmJust sent this via their web site's "comments and suggestions" form. I'm really tired of this bullshit from shitty web designers. This design never worked (see AOL circa mid-90s), doesn't work (see exhibit A below), and will never work (it fails on so many levels). While I applaud the design community for coming up with an approach that can withstand most "design by committee" exercises, is it art? I dare say, it is not. Now, back to my differential equations (perhaps the source of my curmudgeonly outburst).
Dear Canadian Tire,
I normally wouldn't be bothered to take the time to write like this, but I have to say that your website is absolutely terrible (and just like thousands of other cookie-cutter terrible websites done by mediocre web designers the world over). This look went out with AOL in the mid-1990s (yes, I know because of Windows 8 that it's all the rage, but...). The navigation is confusing or nonexistant, the design principle of "least surprises" fails repeatedly (e.g. the pop-down banners that take up half the screen when a mouse hovers over a top menu item), etc.. The amount of Javascript and other stuff running in my browser from your site also makes the performance and interactivity sluggish, and gives an almost subconscious feeling that I'm engaged in an interaction with an inferior product (which reflects on how I feel about the physical products for sale). In its defense, it's all the rage these days, but a company like Canadian Tire should be a trendsetter, not just another also ran on the retail landscape. More specifically, I wanted to buy a lawn mower for my very small rental backyard (which is going to need a machete if I don't pick one up this weekend). I entered that as a search term and some lawn mowers and accessories showed up. So far so good. But I really wanted just a manual (non electric) push mower or something and figured a good way to look was by price. So, I sorted the results by price and its just pages and pages of accessories with no way to narrow the search to simply "lawn mowers" (and the damnable pop-downs keep obscuring the search results when I am trying to navigate)... yay, spark plugs, but I gave up and am just going to stop in at my local Home Hardware to see what they have.
Yours truly,
PF
Dear Canadian Tire,
I normally wouldn't be bothered to take the time to write like this, but I have to say that your website is absolutely terrible (and just like thousands of other cookie-cutter terrible websites done by mediocre web designers the world over). This look went out with AOL in the mid-1990s (yes, I know because of Windows 8 that it's all the rage, but...). The navigation is confusing or nonexistant, the design principle of "least surprises" fails repeatedly (e.g. the pop-down banners that take up half the screen when a mouse hovers over a top menu item), etc.. The amount of Javascript and other stuff running in my browser from your site also makes the performance and interactivity sluggish, and gives an almost subconscious feeling that I'm engaged in an interaction with an inferior product (which reflects on how I feel about the physical products for sale). In its defense, it's all the rage these days, but a company like Canadian Tire should be a trendsetter, not just another also ran on the retail landscape. More specifically, I wanted to buy a lawn mower for my very small rental backyard (which is going to need a machete if I don't pick one up this weekend). I entered that as a search term and some lawn mowers and accessories showed up. So far so good. But I really wanted just a manual (non electric) push mower or something and figured a good way to look was by price. So, I sorted the results by price and its just pages and pages of accessories with no way to narrow the search to simply "lawn mowers" (and the damnable pop-downs keep obscuring the search results when I am trying to navigate)... yay, spark plugs, but I gave up and am just going to stop in at my local Home Hardware to see what they have.
Yours truly,
PF
