25 Jan 2007 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Gadgetry and IT

Habitat web site: the worst retail site ever?

It’s at www.habitat.net and it’s the most frustrating pile of poo I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to use, ever. First you’re presented with this screen of small print, asking you to install “Flash” (which I’ve already got, thanks):

After reading the small print, you have to guess that the next thing to do is to click “United Kingdom” at the bottom, which takes you on to a page where things scroll up, down and around, and irritating jingly noises play. From there things improve: you can at least search for things sensibly, but try going “back” in your browser to the last product you were looking at, and you’re dumped back to the page above instead. Nice. Some of the stuff doesn’t even work: I clicked on “Art on Demand” and got this useful screen:

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I thought I’d use the feedback form to let them know (as if they didn’t already) that their site was the worst site ever. That’s the Worst. Site. Ever. Brilliantly, I had to fill in my full name, address and other contact details just to send them a comment. And when I’d done that, I just got another blank comment screen. Had my comment been sent? There was no way they were going to let me know, that’s for sure.

I know a short cut to find stuff! Like most people, if I want to find “widgets” at “XYZ shop”, I just go to Google and type in “widgets XYZ shop”. Doesn’t everyone? Guess what? It doesn’t work for Habitat’s site. Try searching for “Habitat kitchens” at Google and see what you get.

I bet they paid a fortune for all that nonsense too.

Addendum: I’m not alone. This critique puts it more eloquently than I did. “Now, how can a (plainly very expensive) website end up in such a state? How can a team of plainly very skilled designers and engineers produce something so deliberately bad? The answer is simple – they don’t care.”

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