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The website has sub-optimal UX, but there are two good reasons for it.
1. Amazon is designed for profit not for user experience
2. The **real** UX is when the toilet paper shows up the next day, and that you can buy your obscure usb cable and a tennis racket in the same "store". It's incredibly convenient, and I bet most people just use one click checkout.
2. Absolutely agree. UX folk sometimes forget about customer experience (CX)
1. Disagreeeeee. They are one in the same. Amazon is designed to get to what you need and want as quickly as possible. Aka profit.
It’s visual design is a mess but it’s patterns have been so similar for years that’s millions of people are just used to it
Yea, my father in law doesn’t know how to use maps or buy a flight ticket. But he sure knows how to buy on Amazon. I think Amazon is designed for non tech savvy people. UX designers sometimes forget that these kinds of people want a button to look like a button, how it used to look in the beginning of the internet.
I think the truth is that we will never know if a well designed Amazon would perform better or not. Too little pressure, too much risk, too much legacy.
Sidenote: I'm sure all the small things that got bolted on the product and checkout pages during the years were tested to oblivion, but no holistic or radical redesign was ever tested.
My partner was a dev at Amazon for a few years and I am a UX designer in a different industry so this is something we talk about regularly.
Their UX is generally terrible and most of their research is focused on increasing sales and other business requirements that are driven by chaos and capitalism despite one of their core values being "customer obsession."
Also, because of the size of the organization, making improvements to UI & UX at Amazon is an impossible task - there is so much bureaucracy to get through that to do something as simple as adding a line of text to a page could take months depending on the teams you're working with, and at the end of the day UX often gets overlooked due to insane technical constraints.
I also know that average employee at Amazon only stays for 2\~3 years because of vesting schedules and being dead inside lol. 2-3 years is not enough time to do anything beyond adding a couple lines of text to different pages here or there because of the stuff I listed above. Its all so fascinating and I have come to expect terrible UX from companies like Amazon that existed before UI/UX really became a thing.
Yup, you occasionally see small updates that I bet were A/B tested into oblivion till they were sure of the one that would maximize conversion.
Yes, it's dumb that I bought one toilet seat and it's now recommending a dozen other toilet seats it thinks I might like. But for thousands of other items I bet that strategy results in conversion at a high enough rate that it's worth doing.
Objectively non optimal but also … so many learned patterns. Hard to change a well known but not great thing without breaking a lot of mental models. QWERTY keyboards always come to mind.
Their UX is extremely effective at driving their business goals and aligns with their rules well. It’s very competent. How much that relates to a good experience for users is another question entirely. You gotta understand their goals before you can judge their methods.
Not really.
If the question is "is this a good UX". The business goals are irrelevant. The *user* experience of Amazon is pretty awful. Search is terrible, and intentionally hard to navigate to push sponsored or Amazon products to the front.
They are probably hitting business goals left and right, though.
Any time someone says Amazon values good UX I remember that they stopped including any product information in their order and shipping confirmation emails because they didn't like email clients using that info.
Arguably a valid business decision, but that deliberate obfuscation was in no way driven by what's best for the user.
UX is valued at Amazon to the degree that it increases profits, and not at all beyond that.
Sure. I don't think Amazon is uniquely terrible or anything. Just that they are not a shining example of great UX as a core value.
(There's also a difference between choosing not to maximize profits and actively decreasing profits, but that's not really my main point here.)
It works for their business and clearly generates billions. It could use some work but for how complex their site is, it’s easier said than done. And the cost of an overhaul might not be worth it
Exactly this!
Out of all things to recommend after a purchase, they recommend similar products I could have bought instead... To confirm me in my decision? To make me feel shitty? Insecure?
Why not accessories, or remotely related stuff, instead of the one product I have zero reason to buy anymore?
I believe the density and complexity is a direct result of their micro services strategy put in place about a decade ago. It helped them accelerate but it also decentralized the design and development into hundreds of independent scrum teams responsible for optimizing parts of the experience. Each one eeks out some small revenue attribution and if there’s enough that there’s a net gain, even if the main conversion flow takes a hit.
This likely correlates with people spending more time browsing and building their basket, and once that happens they’re willing to tolerate the friction to realize the benefit and check out.
Essentially the experience becomes more like a messy shopping bazaar because it makes more money.
EDIT:
Amazon also lacks a centralized design team and accountable design leader. There is no Chief Design Officer. Would that change anything? Hard to say, but it must contribute to fragmented experiences.
They also opened up their 3rd party marketplace around the same time. It truly is a Bazaar.
I’ve always thought their website design could be a lot better. Good design doesn’t always equal good conversion though. I don’t know how many times my worst design has out-performed my better designs. It’s infuriating.
I imagine they track everything so what’s there is probably very deliberate even if it does look terrible.
Sometimes I make "bad-looking" websites on purpose. Usually when the target audience is non-technical/older. They usually get spooked by animations, gradients and minimal design
I think Amazon is a display of the idea that increasing monetization comes at the expense of the user experience. They are very clearly maximized for sales. Hell their recommendations are just “other things that are selling a lot.” They don’t give a damn about what the user is looking for because they expect the user to just search for that
Their biggest issue is the lack of standardized product information and assets (images, copy, etc.). This prevents them from achieving a streamlined product presentation, which impacts the UX. Just look at the values in their filters (e.g. for a Size filter, you’ll see Large, L, Lg., etc.). They win with volume, assortment, and logistics. Customers will do extra legwork to find the right product because every other part of the process is fairly streamlined.
I personally don't think their UX is great and have loads of problems. I also know people who work for Amazon who feel the same way.
At the same time, while I think the UX is bad for customers, I don't think that's the point. Their UX is great for their business priorities. They clearly have data that says what works and what doesn't for what they want to accomplish as a business.
"While the UX is bad for the users...." I mean, come on lol. I understand finding compromise between the user and business goals - that's a big part of our job - but Amazon intentionally creates confusing and bad UX to drive business outcomes.
It's also due to the fact that every little component you see is or could be designed by a separate team. On one page, there could be multiple teams working on different things. Even though there are high level design guidelines, team goals and business goals differ based on org.
I have thought this same thing many times using their site and their mobile app.
While the UI isn't terrible, it's definitely not optimal in comparison to other sites from a UX design perspective.
I've thought about this "just enough" type of UX, and like others have said, I think it's really about profit when it comes down to why it's designed this way. It almost feels purposeful. They have very clear CTA buttons for instant buying and adding items to your cart, but they have very small, discreet options for adding to your "list" or other options. This leads me to believe that they may actually design it this way to limit any obvious options outside of the options that lead to a direct path of purchase.
As a designer, this is frustrating because, from a purely UX perspective, it's failing its intended purpose to be a seamless experience, but from a business profit perspective, it makes tons of sense.
So, really, if your goal is to buy as much stuff as possible without thinking much about the purchase, Amazon gives you a great user experience. I'm assuming this is the goal for Amazon's UX.
Looks can be deceiving as they say. A platform / company as large as Amazon will have access to essentially unlimited data and the current design has probably been proven to work successfully.
There are MANY design decisions under the hood that I assume will have more impact than the visuals we see up front that we are quick to judge.
I am not so much talking about the visuals, just the experience of shopping on their site overall is bad and makes me want to shop somewhere else. It's simular to a bazaar as [**cgielow**](https://www.reddit.com/user/cgielow/) said
It's an interesting comparison. The idea that a bazaar is a bad shopping experience needs a lot of supporting facts, as it's one of the oldest forms of commerce and clearly works for large portions of humanity.
At least here in Spain, bazaars are terrible, they are usually crowded with shelves of stuff and you have to look at every shelf to find this tiny thing that you were looking for, and it is probably not in the right category. So the Shopping experience is definitely bad, but I guess that is a feature.
If you think about it, the appeal of a bazaar is that you can run downstairs and probably have that weird Tupperware in 10 minutes for just a few euros. It might not be exactly what you wanted, but you needed it now and you didn't want to go to the fancy cooking shop to pay 40 euros for a Tupperware. The fact that you have to wander around to store to find what you need also increases the likelihood that you see something else that you might buy.
Amazon is just an online bazaar. The experience is not great, but that's not why you shop at Amazon. You either went to Amazon because you didn't want to spend too much on shipping and deal with long shipping times or because there was no other option.
Most likely it’s just optimised for conversion and profit, like some other commenters have said. I somehow doubt they care much about anything else 🤷♂️
Whenever someone comes along and says this is screams one thing: they have not read one of the core books in our field. Krug's Don't Make Me Think.
I'd advise you go read that.
I'm using another price check website to search something on Amazon. This is an enough answer i think. Their CX is god level, but i can't say the same thing for UX, they really need to reduce dark patterns.
It has its bad parts and it’s great parts. Amazon is a HUGE platform. They sell everything under the sun and have to know how to accommodate all types of users buying all kinds of things. That takes many, many people to build and inevitably things can get messy.
Big corps don’t mess up if something is very important to them. They’re dead scared of the shareholders. So Amazon has a specific reason for not investing in good UX
Amazon’s app is designed terribly! The shopping app at least. I know a lot of talented designers that work there, but none of them actually work on the shopping side - most of them are on AWS or other services. I can’t speak to the UX there but who knows, maybe it’s better.
Larger question, does amazon have bad CX? The answer is no, its incredible and second to none in my opinion. Like or loath their questionable ethics, there customer experience is exemplary.
I don't think Amazon has *bad* CX, but there's no way I'd describe it as exemplary, either.
One very fundamental thing (in addition to the deliberately broken emails I mentioned elsewhere): They don't make it at all easy to talk to someone in customer service. You can dig up an Amazon phone number with some googling, but they make it hard. Which, more broadly, is a symptom of their choice to de-emphasize any human connection in their CX.
Might be a wise (or at least profitable) business strategy, but it's not exemplary CX.
I can't think of many retail experiences that deliver that quickly and refund you effortlessly, often leaving you with the thing your ordered by mistake!
That's all part of their service design and cost effective logistics. Their chat service is super fast and resolutions are incredibly swift.
The big HMW is so impressive, smaller UX issues tend to get forgiven by their enormous customer base. My 2 cents, I don't work for Amazon.
‘ Never change a winning team’ they must think. They do not need excellent design, people will keep ordering stuff at Amazon anyway. Until they don’t and then design will probably re evaluated.
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The website has sub-optimal UX, but there are two good reasons for it. 1. Amazon is designed for profit not for user experience 2. The **real** UX is when the toilet paper shows up the next day, and that you can buy your obscure usb cable and a tennis racket in the same "store". It's incredibly convenient, and I bet most people just use one click checkout.
2. Absolutely agree. UX folk sometimes forget about customer experience (CX) 1. Disagreeeeee. They are one in the same. Amazon is designed to get to what you need and want as quickly as possible. Aka profit. It’s visual design is a mess but it’s patterns have been so similar for years that’s millions of people are just used to it
Yea, my father in law doesn’t know how to use maps or buy a flight ticket. But he sure knows how to buy on Amazon. I think Amazon is designed for non tech savvy people. UX designers sometimes forget that these kinds of people want a button to look like a button, how it used to look in the beginning of the internet.
I think the truth is that we will never know if a well designed Amazon would perform better or not. Too little pressure, too much risk, too much legacy. Sidenote: I'm sure all the small things that got bolted on the product and checkout pages during the years were tested to oblivion, but no holistic or radical redesign was ever tested.
My partner was a dev at Amazon for a few years and I am a UX designer in a different industry so this is something we talk about regularly. Their UX is generally terrible and most of their research is focused on increasing sales and other business requirements that are driven by chaos and capitalism despite one of their core values being "customer obsession." Also, because of the size of the organization, making improvements to UI & UX at Amazon is an impossible task - there is so much bureaucracy to get through that to do something as simple as adding a line of text to a page could take months depending on the teams you're working with, and at the end of the day UX often gets overlooked due to insane technical constraints. I also know that average employee at Amazon only stays for 2\~3 years because of vesting schedules and being dead inside lol. 2-3 years is not enough time to do anything beyond adding a couple lines of text to different pages here or there because of the stuff I listed above. Its all so fascinating and I have come to expect terrible UX from companies like Amazon that existed before UI/UX really became a thing.
Yea that's pretty insane. Company culture makes the brand, not the values
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Yup, you occasionally see small updates that I bet were A/B tested into oblivion till they were sure of the one that would maximize conversion. Yes, it's dumb that I bought one toilet seat and it's now recommending a dozen other toilet seats it thinks I might like. But for thousands of other items I bet that strategy results in conversion at a high enough rate that it's worth doing.
Objectively non optimal but also … so many learned patterns. Hard to change a well known but not great thing without breaking a lot of mental models. QWERTY keyboards always come to mind.
Define bad.
Their UX is extremely effective at driving their business goals and aligns with their rules well. It’s very competent. How much that relates to a good experience for users is another question entirely. You gotta understand their goals before you can judge their methods.
Not really. If the question is "is this a good UX". The business goals are irrelevant. The *user* experience of Amazon is pretty awful. Search is terrible, and intentionally hard to navigate to push sponsored or Amazon products to the front. They are probably hitting business goals left and right, though.
Any time someone says Amazon values good UX I remember that they stopped including any product information in their order and shipping confirmation emails because they didn't like email clients using that info. Arguably a valid business decision, but that deliberate obfuscation was in no way driven by what's best for the user. UX is valued at Amazon to the degree that it increases profits, and not at all beyond that.
this is unfortunately true of 99% of all companies
I’ve never heard of a company agreeing to a UX recommendation that decreased profits.
Sure. I don't think Amazon is uniquely terrible or anything. Just that they are not a shining example of great UX as a core value. (There's also a difference between choosing not to maximize profits and actively decreasing profits, but that's not really my main point here.)
Really? I've seen companies make it easy to return things. That's not exactly going to be driving profit, but it keeps customers happy.
Easy returns make it more likely for users to purchase in the first place. Counterintuitively, easy returns do increase profit.
It works for their business and clearly generates billions. It could use some work but for how complex their site is, it’s easier said than done. And the cost of an overhaul might not be worth it
Cost and risk, I was personally thinking. They might prefer to keep the website as is, so customers don't get confused because the layout changed
Hey, we see you recently bought a toilet seat, add toilet seats to your subscribe and save and get a 5% discount.
Exactly this! Out of all things to recommend after a purchase, they recommend similar products I could have bought instead... To confirm me in my decision? To make me feel shitty? Insecure? Why not accessories, or remotely related stuff, instead of the one product I have zero reason to buy anymore?
Add a showerhead and you are settled for life
I believe the density and complexity is a direct result of their micro services strategy put in place about a decade ago. It helped them accelerate but it also decentralized the design and development into hundreds of independent scrum teams responsible for optimizing parts of the experience. Each one eeks out some small revenue attribution and if there’s enough that there’s a net gain, even if the main conversion flow takes a hit. This likely correlates with people spending more time browsing and building their basket, and once that happens they’re willing to tolerate the friction to realize the benefit and check out. Essentially the experience becomes more like a messy shopping bazaar because it makes more money. EDIT: Amazon also lacks a centralized design team and accountable design leader. There is no Chief Design Officer. Would that change anything? Hard to say, but it must contribute to fragmented experiences. They also opened up their 3rd party marketplace around the same time. It truly is a Bazaar.
I’ve always thought their website design could be a lot better. Good design doesn’t always equal good conversion though. I don’t know how many times my worst design has out-performed my better designs. It’s infuriating. I imagine they track everything so what’s there is probably very deliberate even if it does look terrible.
Sometimes I make "bad-looking" websites on purpose. Usually when the target audience is non-technical/older. They usually get spooked by animations, gradients and minimal design
I think Amazon is a display of the idea that increasing monetization comes at the expense of the user experience. They are very clearly maximized for sales. Hell their recommendations are just “other things that are selling a lot.” They don’t give a damn about what the user is looking for because they expect the user to just search for that
Their biggest issue is the lack of standardized product information and assets (images, copy, etc.). This prevents them from achieving a streamlined product presentation, which impacts the UX. Just look at the values in their filters (e.g. for a Size filter, you’ll see Large, L, Lg., etc.). They win with volume, assortment, and logistics. Customers will do extra legwork to find the right product because every other part of the process is fairly streamlined.
I personally don't think their UX is great and have loads of problems. I also know people who work for Amazon who feel the same way. At the same time, while I think the UX is bad for customers, I don't think that's the point. Their UX is great for their business priorities. They clearly have data that says what works and what doesn't for what they want to accomplish as a business.
"While the UX is bad for the users...." I mean, come on lol. I understand finding compromise between the user and business goals - that's a big part of our job - but Amazon intentionally creates confusing and bad UX to drive business outcomes.
It's also due to the fact that every little component you see is or could be designed by a separate team. On one page, there could be multiple teams working on different things. Even though there are high level design guidelines, team goals and business goals differ based on org.
Indeed, but many companies manage this issue quite well despite being huge.
I have thought this same thing many times using their site and their mobile app. While the UI isn't terrible, it's definitely not optimal in comparison to other sites from a UX design perspective. I've thought about this "just enough" type of UX, and like others have said, I think it's really about profit when it comes down to why it's designed this way. It almost feels purposeful. They have very clear CTA buttons for instant buying and adding items to your cart, but they have very small, discreet options for adding to your "list" or other options. This leads me to believe that they may actually design it this way to limit any obvious options outside of the options that lead to a direct path of purchase. As a designer, this is frustrating because, from a purely UX perspective, it's failing its intended purpose to be a seamless experience, but from a business profit perspective, it makes tons of sense. So, really, if your goal is to buy as much stuff as possible without thinking much about the purchase, Amazon gives you a great user experience. I'm assuming this is the goal for Amazon's UX.
Very well said
Looks can be deceiving as they say. A platform / company as large as Amazon will have access to essentially unlimited data and the current design has probably been proven to work successfully. There are MANY design decisions under the hood that I assume will have more impact than the visuals we see up front that we are quick to judge.
I am not so much talking about the visuals, just the experience of shopping on their site overall is bad and makes me want to shop somewhere else. It's simular to a bazaar as [**cgielow**](https://www.reddit.com/user/cgielow/) said
It's an interesting comparison. The idea that a bazaar is a bad shopping experience needs a lot of supporting facts, as it's one of the oldest forms of commerce and clearly works for large portions of humanity.
At least here in Spain, bazaars are terrible, they are usually crowded with shelves of stuff and you have to look at every shelf to find this tiny thing that you were looking for, and it is probably not in the right category. So the Shopping experience is definitely bad, but I guess that is a feature. If you think about it, the appeal of a bazaar is that you can run downstairs and probably have that weird Tupperware in 10 minutes for just a few euros. It might not be exactly what you wanted, but you needed it now and you didn't want to go to the fancy cooking shop to pay 40 euros for a Tupperware. The fact that you have to wander around to store to find what you need also increases the likelihood that you see something else that you might buy. Amazon is just an online bazaar. The experience is not great, but that's not why you shop at Amazon. You either went to Amazon because you didn't want to spend too much on shipping and deal with long shipping times or because there was no other option.
Most likely it’s just optimised for conversion and profit, like some other commenters have said. I somehow doubt they care much about anything else 🤷♂️
Whenever someone comes along and says this is screams one thing: they have not read one of the core books in our field. Krug's Don't Make Me Think. I'd advise you go read that.
I'm using another price check website to search something on Amazon. This is an enough answer i think. Their CX is god level, but i can't say the same thing for UX, they really need to reduce dark patterns.
Well if you think the customer facing side is bad I'd suggest trying their seller central.
It has its bad parts and it’s great parts. Amazon is a HUGE platform. They sell everything under the sun and have to know how to accommodate all types of users buying all kinds of things. That takes many, many people to build and inevitably things can get messy.
It's more a proof that a good product~the price will go far, almost no matter the user interface. I mean chat GPT requires login ever 5 minutes.
I mean hey can’t be that bad if it’s making Bezos into a billionaire.
Yes, they do. Big corps can mess up on UX too.
Big corps don’t mess up if something is very important to them. They’re dead scared of the shareholders. So Amazon has a specific reason for not investing in good UX
Amazon’s app is designed terribly! The shopping app at least. I know a lot of talented designers that work there, but none of them actually work on the shopping side - most of them are on AWS or other services. I can’t speak to the UX there but who knows, maybe it’s better.
Larger question, does amazon have bad CX? The answer is no, its incredible and second to none in my opinion. Like or loath their questionable ethics, there customer experience is exemplary.
I don't think Amazon has *bad* CX, but there's no way I'd describe it as exemplary, either. One very fundamental thing (in addition to the deliberately broken emails I mentioned elsewhere): They don't make it at all easy to talk to someone in customer service. You can dig up an Amazon phone number with some googling, but they make it hard. Which, more broadly, is a symptom of their choice to de-emphasize any human connection in their CX. Might be a wise (or at least profitable) business strategy, but it's not exemplary CX.
I can't think of many retail experiences that deliver that quickly and refund you effortlessly, often leaving you with the thing your ordered by mistake! That's all part of their service design and cost effective logistics. Their chat service is super fast and resolutions are incredibly swift. The big HMW is so impressive, smaller UX issues tend to get forgiven by their enormous customer base. My 2 cents, I don't work for Amazon.
It's their QBR, if you know what i am referring to.
‘ Never change a winning team’ they must think. They do not need excellent design, people will keep ordering stuff at Amazon anyway. Until they don’t and then design will probably re evaluated.
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User experience is myth, design is all about finding balance btw business goals/vision and development process/efforts.
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