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Amazon's store frontend interfaces are A/B tested. Their backend stuff for developers---not so much. The look and feel of the Amazon store looks 'web 1.0' beca

Amazon's store frontend interfaces are A/B tested. Their backend stuff for developers---not so much. The look and feel of the Amazon store looks 'web 1.0' because it has high information density, and less white space. Current web fashion is to have minimalist design with lots of white space, but that fashion not UX. As a UX example, Amazon's store follows pretty standard practices---tables for tabular data, cards for related items that will be skimmed, vertical scrolling to support long item lists without changing the layout on browser resolution, consistent sizing/spacing/coloring for headers, control locality so clicking a button changes information near by it. It does all of the things you'd expect a regular web app to do, but sprays it over a long-form page instead of burying it in tabs increasing scroll distance via whitespace. Where Amazon fails is niches. Their interface is generalist, so they don't have great UX for buying clothes, or buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that).

philfrasty 10y ago
„...because it has high information density...“ +1!! If you look at the Sellercentral backend (for sellers on Amazon) it is breathtaking what kind of Analytics, inventory reports, etc you can generate. Would love to have this kind of level of information in an external (own) ecommerce-shop/system.
joshuak 10y ago
Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow. A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope. Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior. Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or scrolling a pages is actually less difficult then visually searching a cluttered information scape. Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion. It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they already won the market long ago.
cryptoz 10y ago
> buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that). VR Grocery Store please. Let me walk around the store in my home and let me browse the grocery aisles. Make the VR experience 'live' by using the in-store security cameras to construct the VR environment and in-store data like real-time inventory counts.
ec109685 10y ago
I believe the parent poster was saying the AWS ui is what looks dated.

philfrasty 10y ago

„...because it has high information density...“ +1!! If you look at the Sellercentral backend (for sellers on Amazon) it is breathtaking what kind of Analytics, inventory reports, etc you can generate. Would love to have this kind of level of information in an external (own) ecommerce-shop/system.

joshuak 10y ago

Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow. A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope. Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior. Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or scrolling a pages is actually less difficult then visually searching a cluttered information scape. Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion. It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they already won the market long ago.

cryptoz 10y ago

> buying groceries (albeit no one really has a great interface for that). VR Grocery Store please. Let me walk around the store in my home and let me browse the grocery aisles. Make the VR experience 'live' by using the in-store security cameras to construct the VR environment and in-store data like real-time inventory counts.

ec109685 10y ago

I believe the parent poster was saying the AWS ui is what looks dated.