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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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