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 h

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.