17 ms·

I have long held that Amazon(.com) has some of the worst UX I've ever seen, and it still is able to sell massive amounts to consumers. We are left to consider

• kanox 8y ago
  > And DX doesn't matter to most developers? I'm a developer and don't know what that is.
  • pandapower2 8y ago
    Presumably developer experience, the developers experience working with a particular project, tool or whatever. Sometimes referred to as "dev x".
  • r00fus 8y ago
    Developer UX.
• NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  DX? This is new to me, and search finds nothing enlightening or seems like it might be relevant. "Deus ex machina" perhaps? :)
  • lmitchell 8y ago
    Presumably 'developer experience', given how it's used in conjunction with 'user experience' for a developer-focused product :) Admittedly not the most easily understood acronym, and I'm sort of guessing.
    • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Thanks. Of course now it seems obvious enough in context that I should have inferred this. Oh well. :)
  • Ibethewalrus 8y ago
    Dev ex machina :)
  • IncRnd 8y ago
    If you search for UX DX you will find lots of hits about.
• jhwang5 8y ago
  I don't think you really get why enterprises buy managed cloud services, or why consumers buy in general. Your purchasing criteria seems out of tune with what consumers care the most about: selection, price, service.
  • fingerprinter 8y ago
    I'd agree with this for amazon.com and consumers. That still doesn't explain AWS v Azure or GCP which have similar (or better) services, more than competitive pricing and in Azure's case, waaaaay better support. In fact, everything about AWS is typically worse. Perhaps AWS entered the 'no one ever got fired for buying AWS territory' even when there are a ton of better options out there. If that's the case, kinda sucks for devs who are stuck using their crappy services when so many others exist.
    • jhwang5 8y ago
      I think part of it is AWS still has the broadest feature set. Also, the "dev ex" part gets easier especially if you are using AWS services through its CLI, and not through the console. Agreed that the console's UX violates almost every UX principle in terms of its use of signifiers, etc.
    • sokoloff 8y ago
      It would be hard for me to imagine better support than we get from AWS support. Yes, we're paying for enterprise support and that's not inexpensive, but the support itself is phenomenal. We literally have AWS technical generalists on-site once a week and they bring in subject matter experts on specific topics/services as-needed, sometimes on-site, sometimes via video.
• mr_toad 8y ago
  > I have actively stayed away from AWS in the past few years b/c it has such a bad UX/DX and yet....it grows. A lot of people are probably using something like puppet/chef/ansible/terraform and don’t encounter the web console very often.
  • throwaway98121 8y ago
    IMO using the web console for your cloud development sounds like your a tiny shop. Your infrastructure and all that configuration should be in code and version control. I think CloudFormation is difficult to use and could be much easier, but ops rant about the AWS UI being unfriendly makes it sound like he’s not really the kind of customer AWS is really after.
    • jacobsenscott 8y ago
      We are a tiny shop and I use ansible whenever possible. Even managing two or three ec2 instances with the UI is a nightmare. IMO that's a feature - you should start with a cms when small. Not bolt it on when it is too late. I'm looking into terraform though. Ansible's aws support is fairly limited.
      • toomuchtodo 8y ago
        You will love Terraform. I highly recommend it over Cloudformation or any configuration management cloud-specific extensions.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          The reason that you should use CloudFormation is that if you are working for a business, they most likely have a business support agreement with AWS. If you ever come across an issue, you have an easy button - AWS’s excellent support.
          • toomuchtodo 8y ago
• throwaway98121 8y ago
  I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement. I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is. That all being said, I think Amazon is turning into EBay with all the garbage ads I see on the website, just trying to buy replacement toothbrush heads, but that’s an entirely different discussion.
  • thirdsun 8y ago
    > I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement. I imagine a company like Amazon has the resources to do both. > I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is. Same point. These features, performance and an attractive user interface, aren't mutually exclusive. I'd argue that in fact both are tightly coupled and are part of what makes the design and user experience.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      I’m a developer and I play the resident certified AWS Architect when necessary. For me, the “interface” that I use every day is not the website. It’s either the CLI, Boto3 (Python), or the C# SDK.
• colechristensen 8y ago
  This is a shallow view of AWS and Amazon. Amazon is successful because it has mostly everything in stock and can get most of it to you in 2 days. Amazon is logistics and trust. The trust is eroding and the logistics is worse because they're delivering things themselves, but still that is why it is. AWS has more than Azure and GCP. Appearances and experience aren't the whole of a product. Overfocus on them as a producer or consumer is a problem.
  • fingerprinter 8y ago
    That's the thing, it largely _doesn't_ have more than Azure or GCP these days. And for 80%, maybe 90% of all use cases in existence, AWS v Azure v GCP from a pure catalog offering perspective is identical. And when that compounds with other factors, it falls far behind. Obviously Amazon.com is different and it's mostly about logistics, inventory and reduced buyer friction among some other things.
• slededit 8y ago
  I think it mattered originally, when they were one of many. But once you are on the website the reliability of shipping, and simply the fact they already have my credit card is a major factor in repeat business. It was probably much more important in the early days than it is now.
• derefr 8y ago
  AWS's biggest customers are and always have been enterprises who have existing ops teams and existing data-centres, and are trying to "add cloud" or "migrate to cloud" the services that are running on those data centres, without either breaking SLAs with customers, or disrupting the workflows of those existing enterprise ops staff. There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway?
  • sanderjd 8y ago
    > There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway? I mean, lots of people are, right? I'm not myself, so I guess I don't really know, but surely lots of people are still making green-field software (if not, I think our industry is in some trouble...) and presumably a reasonably high proportion of those people are using the current #1 cloud hosting provider. Which part of this is wrong?
  • scarface74 8y ago
    By definition if you are doing stuff on prem and then you start using AWS’s products like lambda, SQS, Fargate, etc you are doing green field projects.
• pbw 8y ago
  See Richard P. Gabriel's essay http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
• kondro 8y ago
  One of the reasons Amazon has been able to achieve so much diversity around what you can do with their cloud systems is because they allow the individual teams to build and manage their own services. I'd argue that if they were building towards one, big, consistent UX (a UX they'd prefer to use the APIs and command-line tools directly anyway, rather than the GUI), that they wouldn't have the amount of functionality, breadth-of-coverage or marketshare they have today.
• scarface74 8y ago
  AWS’s user interface is inconsistent, and as someone who uses most of the different services in a given week - the DevOps, NetOps, and developer portions - I just don’t use the website that often during a given day, I’m almost exclusively either using one of the SDKs or the CLI. Out of all the things I care about, the user interface is not one.
  • cheeze 8y ago
    This was going to be my point. AWS delivers a minimum viable product and heavily iterates on it. Usually features are prioritized over "upgrade the piece of shit angular app we use for the console." I might run through the console to learn how something works, but in general I'm interacting with AWS through a terminal, and doing so that way is generally quite enjoyable. I agree that GCP at least is a better experience for me as a developer, but I'm not sure if that translates directly into better anything for a customer of mine.
• tschwimmer 8y ago
  Can't speak to AWS, but I know that the e-commerce side of Amazon.com is A/B tested to within an inch of its life. They test absolutely everything, including colors, size, layout, spacing, etc to check for the best conversion rate. They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this site optimization and they're constantly running experiments. It may not be good UX as measured by some aesthetic standard or set of best practices, but the site is accomplishing its goal for Amazon and arguably the consumers who use it.
  • ProAm 8y ago
    > They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this site optimization Maybe they should A/B test this team and go with the other one.
    • pageandrew 8y ago
      Pretty doesn’t necessarily mean effective at converting. I think Amazon’s team is perfectly competent at testing whether one design makes more money than another — and I think they’re competent enough to go with the one that makes more money.
      • londons_explore 8y ago
        I have a suspicion they A/B test the little things, like is it better to show the price in dollars or the local currency, and is it better to have a 'add to cart' or 'buy it now' button. They miss the big changes like 'shall we show all the products in a 3d immersive VR gallery' or 'make a site which downloads all data and works entirely offline'. Those big changes might usually fail, but if you never try any of them, you'll end up with a site that looks and behaves like it's from the 1990's, while the rest of the world has moved on.
        • notyourwork 8y ago
          They do try those things too. You under estimate how much experimentation goes on in Amazon.
• shishy 8y ago
  Can you offer more specifics about what you think is so terrible about its UX? To me it's rather simple and clean, and I would expect that they have a vast team of UX experts testing their site to make sure it meets their overall product goals. Besides, what you might find aesthetically pleasing is not necessarily pleasing to a global population of users with varied backgrounds/diverse age groups -- e.g. older generations might prefer the super simple fonts and general design standards that were more prevalent one or two decades ago.
  • philsnow 8y ago
    Some product pages have images that zoom when you hover them, some instead have images that pop open in a (terrible) lightbox. No rhyme or reason as far as I can tell why some are one way and some are the other. Especially for electronics or computer parts, if you don't know _exactly_ what you're looking for down to the part/model number, you're not going to get any help on amazon.com. I get the feeling they don't do any actual categorization (like say newegg seems to do) and instead you're actually getting just full-text search on product descriptions. If you really want the part soon, you'd be fine with either "Prime" or "Prime FREE One-Day", right? But you can't search for both at the same time, for some reason they are mutually exclusive. So you duplicate the browser tab and search for "Prime" options in one and "Free One-Day" options in the other, like a caveman banging two tabs^W rocks together. I just noticed there's yet another option, a checkbox under "Delivery day" reading "Get It by Tomorrow". If you _do_ know exactly what you want, good luck getting it because of the whole similar products from different sources getting intermingled in inventory. I'm frankly blown away by how user-hostile the whole thing is. Prime shipping buys a lot of goodwill, it seems.
    • hef19898 8y ago
      Up until two or three ywars ago Amazon did a tremendous job on catalogue data. Then the catalogue started to show the first issues of bad master data. It is hard work to maintain such large set of product master data, sure. But in the end I had the feeling that quality decreased. Add marketplace and third parties to the mix and it is a complex problem that needs constant maintenance directly impacting CX.
• bg24 8y ago
  Newer the product, more likely they will learn and build a better product. AWS console is very old. That said, most developers do not use the console.
• puranjay 8y ago
  In India, we have Flipkart which is bigger than Amazon. I recently went back to using it and realized that their UX is so much cleaner and better looking than Amazon. Images are uniform, the text is well formatted, the colors aren't just a jumble of grays and the odd orange
• pmiller2 8y ago
  I can’t speak to Azure, but GCP is backed by Google, and Google has a long history of killing off products. That’s not something I’d like to base my business on.
• codeduck 8y ago
  AWS in general feels like an undead survivor of 90's enterprise java websites.
• danmur 8y ago
  I find amazon.com functional in a lot of ways, but it's definitely ugly and inconsistent and sometimes quite difficult to use. That aside though can you imagine if they did a significant reskin? Better or worse they would get torn to shreds. I bet that's at least a factor in what they decide to do.
• tfolbrecht 8y ago
  Maybe AWS's web console was ugly. Their CLI app, APIs, SDKs definitely aren't.
• dageshi 8y ago
  I think in the case of amazon.com, the people who go there usually know what they want, they go, they search and the results they get are good enough. It's actually a terrible site to "browse" if you're looking for something but not really sure what, but if you know roughly what you want it works fine.
• fipple 8y ago
  I don’t use Amazon for the website, I use it because it brings shit to my house in a day or two. Companies with tremendous market power often have shitty customer experiences.
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  If DX mattered to developers then we'd all still be using Rails. But generally the reaction I get when I highlight DX as a reason to pick technology is a misguided and masochistic "pick the right tool for the job" mentality. I would love to see developers prioritizing themselves better. But they don't, themselves, do this.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    Since when were developers clicking around on a website to develop?