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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

It always amuses me how stunningly bad Amazon really is at making standalone pages on their web site. This one is totally unresponsive, has images for headings, and a slightly blurry image for the table. Here's Amazon Locker, which is even more dismal: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Click-and-Collect-with-Amazon-Locke...

I guess they must have to produce all this stuff within the constraints of their CMS, but it really does make me wonder why they can't build better standalone pages outside of it if the occasion arises.

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You'll notice the same applies to Amazon's mobile apps too.

I think they just prioritize functionality over aesthetics. In a lot of cases you can claim aesthetics lead to higher customer satisfaction and conversion, but I'm certain they've A-B tested the crap out of every decision for maximum purchases.

Amazon has many examples where they execute so poorly as to verge on the incompetent. Take the ads on the Kindle for example: why advertise books to me which I already own and purchased from Amazon? And then there is Prime video streaming, which is unwatchable through some client devices in the same house where Netflix is consistently excellent quality. I think they just have big areas where they don't give a rat's ass about doing any better than "meh".

Amazon has "frugality" as a core cultural value. They take pride in not doing any better than "meh" if anything more than "meh" costs more money.

The fact that the table is in image is just lazy web development - which is pretty disappointing coming from a major company like Amazon. I understand this isn't a major client-facing site, but it would still be nice to put some effort into it.

A skilled front-end designer/developer could convert that to an HTML table in a few minutes. Instead they throw up a 672KB 6250 × 1563 JPG image which manages to appear blurry when downscaled.

Oh wow, the JPEG block artifacts in the big orange buttons on that Amazon Locker page are really something. Thank you for sharing!

I don't know if they've changed the table image on the HQ page since your post, but at the moment, it looks to me like the blurriness is mostly due to the way my browser is scaling the image down to 1280x320 px dimensions. The JPEG is large (6250x1653 px and 655 kiB) and looks sharp enough at 100% scale.

This seems like a case where using vector graphics would be more appropriate, or at least not scaling the image down by a weird factor like 4.88.

Edit: I transposed some digits when typing into the calculator and initially thought height and width were being scaled by different factors.

That page is actually responsive, just based on user agent rather than viewport dimensions

That is usually referred to as adaptive design.

You can also notice that this page loads 112Mo for images...

> totally unresponsive

You mean it's not weighed down with tons of JavaShit and annoying transition effects?

They still serve you the product carousel at the bottom of the post.

Most responsive sites use media queries which involve CSS, not JavaScript.

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