[Sigia-l] Amazon.com 99% bad!

[Stewart Dean]

>From: Listera <listera at rcn.com>
>To: SIGIA-L <sigia-l at asis.org>
>Subject: [Sigia-l] Amazon.com 99% bad!
>Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:56:40 -0400
>
>You knew it had to happen; Jakob's after the Amazon contract. :-)
>
>Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design
><http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050725.html>
>

I usually think Jakob really over eggs everything but in this case I agree 
with him - amazon does have an awful interface and was right up there with 
ebay as popular sites that doesn't make thing easy for users (ebay has 
slowly adapted over the years).

It suffers form what I call the 'pile it high and sell it cheap' school of 
functionality that Yahoo is the king of and people like Google are creeping 
towards.  The central mistake is that having become successful people feel 
it's vital to keep on growing, keep on adding innovative features, often 
resulting in the thing that made the site successful, often it's simplicity, 
a thing of the past.

The solution?  This is where I would disagree with Jakob in that I think the 
whole web needs to go through a revolution and move away from it's static 
page approach. The creators of 'microsites' have been having fun with more 
experiential ideas for years (most of them are awfully self indulgent and 
often hard to use) and sites like flickr point the way forward, although 
that site too is suffering from function bloat.

My view is simplicity is the key to not only usability but user attraction. 
After all why does the ipod out sell far more sophisticated MP3 players? It 
doesnt even have a radio.

Stewart Dean
User Experience