Journal Entries

Mar 28, 2006

Suing Target for Bad Design?

A blind UC Berkeley student is suing Target over claims that the superstore’s website is not accessable to visually impaired users. (via SFGate.com)

I think that it is universally stupid for a retailer the size of Target to have a website that excludes a segment of the population. This sounds like outright laziness. Does it make them legally liable? I would argue that it does not.

I doubt Target’s site was designed to specifically exclude a segment of it’s customers. It’s more likely that either they forgot to include them or ignored them. It’s not criminally negligent but it is sloppy customer relations. Target’s marketing department should be appalled.

This lawsuit makes a strong case to define what Molly Holzschlag, well-known web standards advocate, has called a new professionalism for Web developers and designers..

The heart of the issue is simple: We must know our craft! And what we don’t know, we must be willing to say we don’t know and be open to learning.

Quite simply, the agency that developed Target’s site, intentionally or not, messed up. The lawsuit, while without legal merit, should serve as a reminder that poor design is equivalent to poor customer service. Neither should be acceptable to people who would call themselves professionals.

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