His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably:
> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.
My main gripe with Amazon is how slow it is. It takes me like 30 seconds to change my shipping address and payment method before placing an order. I always assume it’s because they’re using Glacier on AWS to drive that functionality.
That sounds more like your hardware/internet than it does Amazon's fault - I have never had any delay when changing address or payment method while placing an order, and I place a lot of orders on Amazon.
I timed it on my computer, in between my clicks there was about 4 seconds delay total when changing payment method and changing shipping address. Your "30 seconds" delay is definitely something specific to your computing platform. Maybe try upgrading your Pentium 1 computer?
>Do I break your balls further by pointing out there was never a “Pentium 1” CPU?
You could try to be pedantic to distract from your obvious problem that your computer hardware is slow. "Pentium 1" means the original "Pentium" CPU, it is meant to disambiguate because "Pentium" could refer to Pentium 2, or Pentium 3, but I wanted to be clear that your computer is as slow as an original Pentium computer. But sure, go ahead and be pedantic instead of admitting your computer is slow.
>Do I break your balls too and say “I’ve never had any delay” and “there was about 4 seconds delay” are mutually-exclusive?
I said 4 seconds *TOTAL* delay. So that's 2 seconds delay across two actions, which I don't consider to be any real delay at all in the context of clicking on websites, and is certainly nowhere near the 30 seconds you claimed. If you really are seeing 30 seconds of delay (I doubt you've actually measured it), then your computer hardware is definitely to blame, and not Amazon. This is a you problem, not an Amazon problem.
> surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.
surprisingly bad ?
Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ?
I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.
Keep in mind that was written like 12 years ago, when things looked differently than they do now. (Notably that's pre material design and pre kennedy (the precursor to material))
article is from Aug 2005, so more like 19 years... I became suspicious when I was told the hero of the story left Amazon to join Yahoo!, which, y'know, was what people were wont to do back in the day, not so much anymore I'd guess
Good luck trying to find a thunderbolt cable unless you already know they categorize it as a "Mac Accessory - Charging Essentials". Lots of big carousels showing a sum total of 3 items at a time, and you better know the what a thunderbolt cable looks like, and don't mistake it for "merely" a usb3 charging cable. Or the 0.5m vs 1m.
Or using a mac - window management issues aside (it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....) - the "settings" app is a joke. A huge list of sections on the left, grouped seemingly arbitrarily, with a "Search" that only really works is you already know the exact wording of the option you're looking for. But hey, it's got fancy icons, so I guess that's nice.
This is all a bit tongue in cheek - using a mac to write this. All UX is "bad" in different ways IMHO. "Objectively best" UX is a pipe dream.
>Or using a mac - ...(it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....)
Isn't this normal on Windows too? The few times I have to use it, it seems I'm always doing something where some sub-window will pop up that I need to use or read, but the stupid thing is comically small, but needs to be scrolled (because there's too much content inside it for its size), but I'm forbidden from expanding the window size the way you can with normal windows.
This never happens to me in KDE: if a window is too small by default (which sometimes happens), I can always expand it.
I don't think I've ever clicked into a category on Amazon. I wouldn't need to know it's under Mac accessories, id just use the search bar and type in thunderbolt. In what world would clicking through a hierarchical UI be faster or easier than a search?
But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.
I would argue that Amazon's UI could garner more sales and reconstruct more of its slowly fading popularity if it simply stopped being such a dumpster fire of bad design, confusion, chaos, searches that barely work and of course, rampant links to attempts at sales fraud.
The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you can from existing users while potential new ones trickle away to sites that are simply better, easier to navigate and just less likely to sell you falsely packaged shit.
I'm dubious. Investing in development and design is one of the more expensive ways for a company to increase returns. Plus, Amazon are in such a dominant e-commerce market position [0] that they don't need to worry about UX beyond the ability to click "buy". Despite the poor design, their share is forecast to continue growing past 40% this year [1].
Yes but in arguing that you miss the point entirely. If Amazon's only motives in how it designes its customer interface are "hah, who gives a shit, we're so big that they'll keep buying even if we mistreat them and expose them to rampant fraud", that speaks of a shitty company which will eventually be eaten by the market. Consumer tolerance is finite, and smarter people than me have noticed the same thing and are working to chip away at it with shoppers.
I'd also hope for something a little bit more honest from Amazon, given all their multi-decade spiels about customer service, but here we are.
> that speaks of a shitty company which will eventually be eaten by the market
Agreed! Although "eventually" takes a very long time, possibly decades. In the meantime there are a host of cheaper tactics for maintaining and draining market share: acquisitions, exploitative terms (like Amazon's "best buy" conditions), regulatory capture etc... .
The issue is that the current system of shareholder capitalism strongly encourages short-term gains in lieu of sustainability. It's very difficult to justify spending on ease of use when you already have the users and there are things you could do to milk them like making ads more subtle.
Also, Amazon's retail empire is very much buttressed by its speedy delivery service, and thus warehouses and the truck fleet. A much better web site sometimes cannot compete with next-day delivery. (And sometimes can, of course!)
Etsy is pretty slick, although lately I've heard it has similar (but not the same) product/seller trust issues as Amazon.
iHerb has a somewhat Amazon-like UI but noticeably less cluttered and more structured. It highlights a minimum "best by" date, which is also a guarantee that goes beyond pure UI design but provides the kind of customer-friendly interface that informs rather than confuses.
I usually find Webstaurant product listings pretty informative and much cleaner.
From Big Tech, Google & Apple may not have a comparable physical goods marketplace but the marketplaces they do have - books and applications - are much cleaner and more focused than their Amazon counterparts.
Of course, the gold standard is McMaster-Carr.
I know Amazon is more successful than those examples. Microsoft Windows is also much more successful than its competitors, but I don't think most people would see that and argue "the point of an OS/software is not to be easy to use or convenient or understandable". Certainly it's not the point of Windows but I'd say that's because competition involves factors unrelated to quality and quality is multi-dimensional, not because quality is "not the point".
well, for anything related to photographic equipment, try B&H, much better. Decent search too and without all the ridiculous crud of false buy leads that Amazon dumps on you despite being one of the world's biggest companies and perfectly capable of providing a clean product search that¿s reliable.
Or, for random products, even damn walmart does better, and that's just embarrassing. I could go on with this but if you're defending the obviously broken interface that Amazon provides for buying products, I suspect your motives.
The one single thing I continue to use them for is book reviews, not buys, but just reviews, and that's a low bar indeed.
I'm an absolute nobody compared to Tesler, but I remember a hack week we did at Amazon probably in 2009 or so - the SVP (reporting directly to Jeff) was giving a little intro speech to what they hoped to see out of the hack week, and he ended with an admonition: "Whatever you do, DO. NOT. ATTEMPT. TO. REDESIGN. THE. SITE. UI.", and then later was told by him that Jeff will literally rip your head off if he caught wind of it.
> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.
[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611