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But that’s not correct. Amazon changes the nuts and bolts parts of it’s UI a lot and they do not tend to make egregious UI mistakes. They use dark patterns, su

by arrrg 7y ago

But that’s not correct. Amazon changes the nuts and bolts parts of it’s UI a lot and they do not tend to make egregious UI mistakes. They use dark patterns, sure, but don’t confuse useable UI with beautiful UI.

davnicwil 7y ago
Could you give me an example of this? My impression as a user is that it's not changed very much at all for years. This is the web UI by the way. Both on Amazon.com and AWS. If I'm wrong, fair enough. Need to change my model! > don’t confuse useable UI with beautiful UI. Perhaps I didn't get this across clearly enough, but I definitely don't. It's actually the main point I'm trying to make. Beautiful UI serves a certain type of UX which most products don't need. What most products need is boring, functional, useable design that just works, Amazon being a good example of this.
- arrrg 7y ago
  Amazon has changed massively over the years. Check out the Wayback Machine. (Sadly looking at the checkout itself that way isn’t really an option.) Only one example of thinking outside the box that’s relatively new on Amazon is putting your delivery address right there in the main navigation and giving you the opportunity to change it. This kind of upfront communication allows them to keep the checkout process itself extremely light and effortless which to me seems to be pretty much the focus of everything they do.
  - davnicwil 7y ago
    Ah, very interesting example thanks. We're back to definitions of UI and UX and the overlap between the two :-) That example you gave, whilst obviously literally an update of the UI, I would punt as being more a UX change, actually. The reason is that the point of it is what you say - to reduce friction of the checkout flow by not forcing you to wait until you do that to change your address, but letting you do it ahead of time so that next time you check out, you're just a couple of clicks away from hitting the 'pay' button - as opposed to leaving functionality the same and just making things look nicer. Obviously this change is physically implemented as a UI change, but my question would be did the nav bar's design, position on the screen, etc, change? No - it was a flow change implemented within the existing UI design metaphors. What I'm more alluding to with UI changes is changing those designs and metaphors, with the hope of making the UX 'nicer' as a result. This only works if nicer UI is nicer UX. In Amazon's case that's not true, so they stick with the same server-rendered pages, buttons, navbar, form fields, etc etc that they've had forever. They make flow changes within that UI though, of course, to facilitate better UX.

by arrrg 7y ago

davnicwil 7y ago

Could you give me an example of this? My impression as a user is that it's not changed very much at all for years. This is the web UI by the way. Both on Amazon.com and AWS. If I'm wrong, fair enough. Need to change my model! > don’t confuse useable UI with beautiful UI. Perhaps I didn't get this across clearly enough, but I definitely don't. It's actually the main point I'm trying to make. Beautiful UI serves a certain type of UX which most products don't need. What most products need is boring, functional, useable design that just works, Amazon being a good example of this.

arrrg 7y ago
Amazon has changed massively over the years. Check out the Wayback Machine. (Sadly looking at the checkout itself that way isn’t really an option.) Only one example of thinking outside the box that’s relatively new on Amazon is putting your delivery address right there in the main navigation and giving you the opportunity to change it. This kind of upfront communication allows them to keep the checkout process itself extremely light and effortless which to me seems to be pretty much the focus of everything they do.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  Ah, very interesting example thanks. We're back to definitions of UI and UX and the overlap between the two :-) That example you gave, whilst obviously literally an update of the UI, I would punt as being more a UX change, actually. The reason is that the point of it is what you say - to reduce friction of the checkout flow by not forcing you to wait until you do that to change your address, but letting you do it ahead of time so that next time you check out, you're just a couple of clicks away from hitting the 'pay' button - as opposed to leaving functionality the same and just making things look nicer. Obviously this change is physically implemented as a UI change, but my question would be did the nav bar's design, position on the screen, etc, change? No - it was a flow change implemented within the existing UI design metaphors. What I'm more alluding to with UI changes is changing those designs and metaphors, with the hope of making the UX 'nicer' as a result. This only works if nicer UI is nicer UX. In Amazon's case that's not true, so they stick with the same server-rendered pages, buttons, navbar, form fields, etc etc that they've had forever. They make flow changes within that UI though, of course, to facilitate better UX.