As our personal 10 month project nears completion I've needed to utilize some third party commercial tools to facilitate relevant communications.
Specifically, I've had to set up baby registries on several sites. I was going to just do Amazon.com, but then I found out that not all of my family knows how to use Amazon.com, so that wouldn't work for said communications...
Target has coated the country in red bulls-eyes and seems to be fairly well known, so I moved items onto their registry.
Only to discover what a living Hell it is to try and use Target.com.
I would talk about the entire site, but just explaining how frustrating the menus are would take three pages.
So, today we will discuss a small, small detail: trying to login and update an item on a registry.
I have a bookmark to our registry, so I went directly there. That is, after all, why we, as developers, make pages that CAN be bookmarked.
This is the page I see:
I need to make changes. So I click the big silver button at the top, the one that says, "Update."
Except, because Target.com is evidently operating in some logic schema that makes sense to only them, the "Update" button does NOTHING.
Actually, that's not true. It reloads the page. Unchanged.
So now I am stuck trying to figure out how to login. If it won't let me update, maybe it doesn't know who I am... even though the page says, "Hi, [my name]" at the top?
I click on the even bigger blue button, "My Registry."
Which takes me here:
Hmm, I wonder what to do now. I appear to be logged in, but there is no update or edit or anything like that. I click, "My Registry" again. It reloads the page.
I click, "Add Items to Registry," that takes me to a bunch of cribs and whatnot with, again, no way to edit what I already have added. I don't go far down that path because I really don't want to add anything else to this damn thing ever again at this point.
In final desperation I click, "Create New Registry."
I know I'm clicking on the wrong thing, but I'm out of options and maybe that page will have a link to what I need.
And lo, there it is. A login screen. I know, I know, I'm already logged in. But this looks more promising that anything ELSE I've seen so far.
So I login.
Which promptly takes me back to....
The very page I started on, but with different buttons.
This leads me to wonder: Why does the silver "Update" button even exist? If you're logged in enough to actually edit stuff, it vanishes. Why, Target.com, why?
Final note... see those comment boxes under items? Well, Target.com never tells you how long is too long on them, but if you fill them up with text, they don't take. Not only do they not take, but if you put comments in, say, 15 items, and ONE of those comments is too long, the site dumps all the comments and puts a notice at the top of the page.
This is how all my comments ended up terse and identical. There's only so many times you can type cute and friendly messages only to have a website destroy them and continue to be cute and friendly.
Typing this entire blogger posting took less time than launching our original registry... by a factor of about five or six...
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