I am a Crazy Person | Hacker News Reader

I am a Crazy Person

inqk.net

44 pointspyrmont25 comments

I went to a talk by one of Amazon's UX researcher guys, and Amazon's clutter boils down to a simple thing:

Cram a bunch of ways of finding products on to every page (except for the checkout flow), and people will find at least one thing that works for them.

It's completely offensive to our designer sensibilities, but what they've found is that users just tune out the parts of the page that don't work for them and go right to the parts they use (almost like muscle memory). It's the kind of thing you can only do on a site with a lot of repeat customers.

Oh also he revealed the secret formula for the "buy these products together and save" part:

Product A + Product B + Product C = Total

Interesting, I'd say it almost HAS to be something else. A number of times I've selected the 'bundle' then realized it was more expensive than adding each item to my cart individually.

Maybe "save" refers to shipping

I think it refers to the already-discounted prices. Technically, you're still saving. You're just not saving any extra.

There recommendations engine must make them a small fortune, I think that's one of there really keys to success. Once you have started looking at certain products they really know hoe to hit you both in email and on their pages about similar ones. Armed with the amount of purchase data they have they probably know what people want better than the people themselves.

For a real-life version of that visit an IKEA store, they practically force you to walk by their whole collection.

It's the one reason I absolutely loathe going there.

The writer of this post is not an average Amazon consumer. I'll confess I click around a lot on their similar items links.

You are not an average IKEA shopper.

My girlfriend loves going to IKEA for that reason. She looks through everything from couches to decorative cardboard boxes because of the 'walking trail' layout. Hence an hour of entertainment that she knows will be fresh and interesting every 6 months or so.

I once tried to convince her to take a shortcut to get what we actually needed and she looked at me like I was crazy and we were supposed to follow the arrows.

But I don't buy things from IKEA, I carry them. She is their target market and they give her a good experience.

That's true, if you want to buy anything from them, be prepared to spend a lot more time than needed. The store I sometimes go to is organized as basically one long aisle spanning two floors. Contrast with Home Depot or any supermarket, where you have several parallel aisles. So yes, the store is not optimized to make find what you want quickly -- I guess they want to make buying from them an "experience".

To their credit, they do give away those little maps of the store -- don't remember if they include the shortcuts on them. Oh, and the smoked salmon is good too.

The maps do include the shortcuts.

I have had memorable "experiences" at Ikea.

I wasn't aware the cupboards were big and sturdy enough for that sort of "experience".

Oh, there are a LOT of things you're not aware of, bud.

I did a similar thing on my CV/resume (when I still used one): for my interests, I'd just list everything I'd had some genuine interest in (shallow or deep), and added to it over months, so it was about 5-7 lines of words.

The purpose of this interests section was to form some non-work connection of interests with the interviewer. What happens if you look at a block of words like that is that your mind instantly picks out words that are meaningful to you.

It was an interactive, mind-reading resume.

It takes me about one minute to get an overview of opinion pieces on that new page and to find out whether I want to read anything. During that one minute I will scroll all the way down. I don’t even have to think about it. This is one of the New York Times’ more rigid layouts which means that I can actually systematically read the headline of every single piece on that page without getting lost. Cluttered is the last thing I would call it.

Sure, they could display less. Ten rows, two columns – that sounds to me like they picked a nice round number without much thought. Five would do but in this day and age scrolling is easy. (This guy also seems to have a screen with a low resolution. I have only 900 vertical pixels and I have to press page down three times.)

This is the proverbial signal vs. noise ratio with a twist that Nsignal + Nnoise is ridiculously high.

You're not crazy.

We all want clean sites and easily accessed information. I'd pay good money for a site that presented me with nigh-perfectly organized personalized "information" (be it news, sports, articles, tech articles, etc.), but nobody can do it.

So in lieu of the impossible they use the shotgun method, and it works.

Purists hate it. $ > purists.

So does he think there should just be less content? It's one thing for a blog (e.g. daring fireball) to have a sweet minimalistic design that only shows you one thing at a time... but sites like Amazon and the NYTimes have an absolutely massive amount of content that they're trying to provide. How is the NYTimes supposed to make a sleek, un-cluttered interface when they have 3000 new articles every day? And it's not junk -- nearly every one of those articles is thoughtful and well-written. They all deserve some attention.

Do you have any examples of websites that have ginormous amounts of content and simple, un-cluttered interfaces? And don't say google, because that's different.

I'm not sure to be honest. The title of the post is slightly facetious but really only slightly. I'm thinking I must have a problem because if there is no other way, and if this is not really a big problem for most web users, then it's my problem to deal with.

The immediate idea I have is not to used fixed layouts and less 'blurb'. I'm looking at the Opinion site at the moment (the design of which has changed since last night) and I'd prefer if instead of giving me a blurb about Nicholas Kristof's piece it just said Nicholas Kristof on the Millennium Development Goals.

I might look at mocking up an alternative, though. I'd like to see if I can come up with something that would suit at least me.

It is easier and quicker to scroll down than to find how to navigate to and then load several different pages. If you don't like it, don't scroll.

I'm pretty sure that Amazon, at least, is testing the hell out of their layouts. You may not be able to comprehend the guy who thinks "Fabric softener!", but he's probably out there, spending more money than the people who prefer less random products.

...not that that makes you crazy, though. Maybe crazy people just spend more money online than you do. :)

Or maybe they've just found some aesthetically offensive local maximum.

"but it doesn’t stop pages that are three or four scrolls deep"

writes the man that wrote a post 3 scrolls deep.

I am the man and yes, it's a long post. I'm not actually against putting a large amount of content on a web page. It's the overloading to pieces of content that themselves lead off to individual pages that has me frustrated.

If I may restate this: You're on the article page, therefore we can reasonably assume you want to read the article. Being on the opinions splash page however does not lead one to conclude that you want to read every opinion in the paper.

An alternative, for example, might be only showing the top ranked opinions, plus some minimalist options to find the others if you want them (a list of categories, a search bar, a "complete index" link...).

which he addresses in TFA.

So what's the solution?

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