Oh Target, how much do we love your branded shopping? This BDA certainly tests this assumption, offering lots of opportunity to see product, as well as over-branded design and a distinct lack of user focus.

Led bravely by the familiar Target dog, the widget presents a "Pick of the Day," "Tip of the Week," "Gift Finder," "Weekly Ad" and a "Settings" section, where you can set the masthead to count down to a specific date.

The application

The good

• Yahoo will show you how many times a widget has been downloaded; in this case it's more than 27,000. Even if you consider that a BDA failure, it's still an astounding ROI for exposure: these people are being alerted to a new product on their desktops on a daily basis.
  
• For Target's most faithful, it's a hit and a little taste of product and design daily. And the widget collapses itself to just the dog and the countdown when not in use, which is a nice feature.

The bad

• The site is more personalized than the widget. Why not bring that functionality to the desktop?
  
• Surprise! Pop-ups are bad! Widgets often launch browser windows, but there's no standard for when that happens in the experience, so you have to make your own standard and follow it, which Target neglected to do. If one style of button launches a browser, then they all should. It's a challenge that makes a difference in the user experience.
  
• Will I really keep it as a timer? It only counts days. Not very useful.
  
• Worse than the lack of utility is the Target red that outlines the widget. The contrast between the widget and the desktop burns my eyes. I'm no expert on the most popular desktop colors, but my guess is that most are blue, and that the least popular desktop colors are hues that would compliment this blaring shade of red. I can't even look at this widget for more than a few seconds without it diverting my eyes to any other more reasonable palette on the screen.
  
• Wait a second, no video? This was another glaring omission, and a missed opportunity. Target could have used its BDA to let consumers download high-quality videos in the background and to serve alerts to users when they're ready to be seen. People love those Target ads. Why not repurpose them?

What you can take away

• You've already invested in dynamic web features. Now see their true potential on the desktop, where instead of having to re-enter criteria with every visit, the BDA can remember and do the searching in the background, returning what the user is interested in directly to the desktop.
  
• Another practical reuse for retailers is the ability of your BDA to read the same cookies your website left behind. Did your BDA user drop a cart in your checkout process? The BDA can remind your user by displaying those cart items on the desktop, offering checkout at a glance and a click away.
  
• Moreover, you can use that cookie information to push behaviorally targeted offers to the BDA. It's just repurposing your existing investment in a context far more convenient than within the web browser.