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I remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek. The longer I stay in this industry, and

I remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek. The longer I stay in this industry, and the more I learn about compliance, customer surprise, and the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability, the more I realize it absolutely was.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Can you elaborate on the difficulty?
- deanCommie 3y ago
  OK, I think the difficulty isn't the first level of implementation, but all the edge cases. I think that's true about a lot of innovation. So yes, the elevator pitch is just "remember the shipping and billing details, and use it by default". But the question is the edge cases: First, you have to remember that this came at a time when people were still nervous about even giving your credit card to a website. Cross-web identity wasn't a thing, password managers weren't a thing. Second, you need intelligence for what are the default options to select? It's easy for iTunes when the delivery is digital, or for a Prime member when 99% of the time the shipping is free. But what about for everyone else - should 1 click choose the fastest shipping or the cheapest? Is there a 3rd option? OK, you might say the customer should be able to customize that in the profile. But A) what if they don't, and B) what are the extreme edge cases? If someone wants it the fastest, is it worth it if it costs 100$? Or is it a % of the cost of the good? Is faster shipping by 1 day worth it if the shipping costs twice as much? And so on.
- runako 3y ago
  > the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability Not sure what the OP had in mind, but my current favorite example is Expedia. I have used Expedia consistently for over 15 years. Have bought many flights for the family etc. over the years. They know who I travel with. Yet if I open Expedia now to book a flight, I will have to enter the ages of my kids again, as if Expedia didn't know their birthdays. Apparently it is difficult to get the balance correct.
  - dustyleary 3y ago
    It's not a question about difficulty, it's that nobody really gives a shit. I'm sure everyone on this site knows that it would not be difficult at all to implement this. Perhaps there is some valid legal concern over remembering minors' data, but if so, you can pretty easily come up with another dozen examples of sites elsewhere having similar issues with non-sensitive data. The problem is that you usually have to have someone who is actually passionate about the product to drive all these little things home. Maybe this was a bug that was the next item on their backlog, but then someone in the chain of command said "it's good enough now, ship it.", and then everyone got moved on to the next thing. Almost everyone at most companies, at all levels, is just doing a job. Very few people actually care about the product.
    - abecedarius 3y ago
      Was the patent technically nonobvious? The concerns in this seem to be saying it can be hard to overcome organizational and legacy friction instead, as far as I can tell. I never heard of anything nonobvious at the time either.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Should storing people's ages also be patentable?
    - runako 3y ago
      To the extent that business models are patentable, maybe so? We're 25+ years into online travel, and nobody has implemented it. Maybe it's one of those things that looks simple but isn't? For technical difficulty, it's certainly no less difficult than storing credit card details for reuse, and that passed muster at the PTO. All that said, I am excited to see what's (hopefully?) coming. A travel site should be able to intuit what kind of trip I'm planning, or ask me if it's not obvious. If I do a search for a city that I fly to every other week, perhaps it's okay to just go ahead and sort to the top the same flights and hotel I used last time. If the flight is in the summer and to a popular vacation area, perhaps guess that my family will also be traveling. These things have all been technically possible for decades, but we don't see them in the wild. Maybe they are less obvious or more difficult than they appear from the outside (I have never built a travel agent).
barnabee 3y ago
I’m still furious that this is considered patentable.
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
I recall an interview with someone about this - I think it was Tim O'Reilly - where it turned out that Bezos had a hard time getting the developers to even see the value in it. They kept putting in confirmation dialogs and he'd have to go back and tell them to take the confirmation out, and that was what persuaded O'Reilly it really was innovative, the fact that it was difficult to get the programmers of the feature to even understand the requirement. Edit: maybe not O'Reilly, since he penned this [1]. Maybe it was Kevin Kelly? [1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Can you elaborate on the difficulty?

deanCommie 3y ago
OK, I think the difficulty isn't the first level of implementation, but all the edge cases. I think that's true about a lot of innovation. So yes, the elevator pitch is just "remember the shipping and billing details, and use it by default". But the question is the edge cases: First, you have to remember that this came at a time when people were still nervous about even giving your credit card to a website. Cross-web identity wasn't a thing, password managers weren't a thing. Second, you need intelligence for what are the default options to select? It's easy for iTunes when the delivery is digital, or for a Prime member when 99% of the time the shipping is free. But what about for everyone else - should 1 click choose the fastest shipping or the cheapest? Is there a 3rd option? OK, you might say the customer should be able to customize that in the profile. But A) what if they don't, and B) what are the extreme edge cases? If someone wants it the fastest, is it worth it if it costs 100$? Or is it a % of the cost of the good? Is faster shipping by 1 day worth it if the shipping costs twice as much? And so on.
runako 3y ago
> the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability Not sure what the OP had in mind, but my current favorite example is Expedia. I have used Expedia consistently for over 15 years. Have bought many flights for the family etc. over the years. They know who I travel with. Yet if I open Expedia now to book a flight, I will have to enter the ages of my kids again, as if Expedia didn't know their birthdays. Apparently it is difficult to get the balance correct.
- dustyleary 3y ago
  It's not a question about difficulty, it's that nobody really gives a shit. I'm sure everyone on this site knows that it would not be difficult at all to implement this. Perhaps there is some valid legal concern over remembering minors' data, but if so, you can pretty easily come up with another dozen examples of sites elsewhere having similar issues with non-sensitive data. The problem is that you usually have to have someone who is actually passionate about the product to drive all these little things home. Maybe this was a bug that was the next item on their backlog, but then someone in the chain of command said "it's good enough now, ship it.", and then everyone got moved on to the next thing. Almost everyone at most companies, at all levels, is just doing a job. Very few people actually care about the product.
  - abecedarius 3y ago
    Was the patent technically nonobvious? The concerns in this seem to be saying it can be hard to overcome organizational and legacy friction instead, as far as I can tell. I never heard of anything nonobvious at the time either.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Should storing people's ages also be patentable?
  - runako 3y ago
    To the extent that business models are patentable, maybe so? We're 25+ years into online travel, and nobody has implemented it. Maybe it's one of those things that looks simple but isn't? For technical difficulty, it's certainly no less difficult than storing credit card details for reuse, and that passed muster at the PTO. All that said, I am excited to see what's (hopefully?) coming. A travel site should be able to intuit what kind of trip I'm planning, or ask me if it's not obvious. If I do a search for a city that I fly to every other week, perhaps it's okay to just go ahead and sort to the top the same flights and hotel I used last time. If the flight is in the summer and to a popular vacation area, perhaps guess that my family will also be traveling. These things have all been technically possible for decades, but we don't see them in the wild. Maybe they are less obvious or more difficult than they appear from the outside (I have never built a travel agent).

barnabee 3y ago

I’m still furious that this is considered patentable.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

I recall an interview with someone about this - I think it was Tim O'Reilly - where it turned out that Bezos had a hard time getting the developers to even see the value in it. They kept putting in confirmation dialogs and he'd have to go back and tell them to take the confirmation out, and that was what persuaded O'Reilly it really was innovative, the fact that it was difficult to get the programmers of the feature to even understand the requirement. Edit: maybe not O'Reilly, since he penned this [1]. Maybe it was Kevin Kelly? [1] https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537