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

[Scott Nelson]

On Jul-26-2005, at 6:05 AM, Stewart Dean wrote:

> 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.

True enough. It also is an argument for the fact that usability is both:
- relative, and
- not the magic bullet
eBay works because the audience wants it too, as does Amazon. The  
business model has been so successful, and has found such a large  
audience that people want to use it. As a result, a site that's only  
half way usable grows a huge audience.

> sites like flickr point the way forward, although that site too is  
> suffering from function bloat.

Flickr, in my view, suffers from much more than that. The best thing  
about Flickr is the fact that you don't need a browser to upload  
photos - they built an app. I could conceivably use it without ever  
touching
>
> After all why does the ipod out sell far more sophisticated MP3  
> players? It doesnt even have a radio.

Because the whole point of me being able to carry 20GB of MY music  
with me is I don't WANT a radio? I am a radio station when I use my  
iPod.

Or, because in this case the interface DOES make a device more  
usable. I've sold, and used, the Creative Labs products. I'd call  
their interfaces clunky and difficult to use in comparison, but my  
mother taught me to be honest: they're crap. They make it very  
difficult to navigate through even a moderately sized library.
--
Skot Nelson
skot at penguinstorm.com