This has nothing to do with the “UX” of your application. Sure, you may frustrate users if you don’t follow these rules. However, users will never use the thing you’re building if doesn’t meet their needs.
Their UI hasn't really changed in years, but their UX has, a lot. Do you think they would have seen the same amount of growth if they'd focused on improving the UI of their site, rather than the UX of their service?
It's not that UI is unimportant. On the contrary, I personally think it's very important, but only in as much as it serves the UX. This for instance means that a company like Apple has to invest a lot more in evolving and improving their UI. It's fundamental to their UX of beautiful, useable devices. In a sense the UI is the UX, so they're tied together very closely. For most companies/products that isn't the case though. Most are more like Amazon.
To Amazon, the UI just needs to be functional, and get the user through to making a purchase as quickly and with as little hassle as possible. That's why they've stuck with essentially the same design and layout for years - customers know it, and it just works. Any changes making it fancier or prettier would be, at least in the short term, detrimental to the UX.
They use dark patterns, sure, but don’t confuse useable UI with beautiful UI.
If I'm wrong, fair enough. Need to change my model!
> don’t confuse useable UI with beautiful UI.
Perhaps I didn't get this across clearly enough, but I definitely don't. It's actually the main point I'm trying to make. Beautiful UI serves a certain type of UX which most products don't need. What most products need is boring, functional, useable design that just works, Amazon being a good example of this.
Only one example of thinking outside the box that’s relatively new on Amazon is putting your delivery address right there in the main navigation and giving you the opportunity to change it.
This kind of upfront communication allows them to keep the checkout process itself extremely light and effortless which to me seems to be pretty much the focus of everything they do.
That example you gave, whilst obviously literally an update of the UI, I would punt as being more a UX change, actually. The reason is that the point of it is what you say - to reduce friction of the checkout flow by not forcing you to wait until you do that to change your address, but letting you do it ahead of time so that next time you check out, you're just a couple of clicks away from hitting the 'pay' button - as opposed to leaving functionality the same and just making things look nicer.
Obviously this change is physically implemented as a UI change, but my question would be did the nav bar's design, position on the screen, etc, change? No - it was a flow change implemented within the existing UI design metaphors.
What I'm more alluding to with UI changes is changing those designs and metaphors, with the hope of making the UX 'nicer' as a result. This only works if nicer UI is nicer UX. In Amazon's case that's not true, so they stick with the same server-rendered pages, buttons, navbar, form fields, etc etc that they've had forever. They make flow changes within that UI though, of course, to facilitate better UX.
As long as you can very quickly and easily buy on Amazon because it's cheaper and perhaps other reasons like the delivery story, returns story, customer services story etc are all better, then the UI in service of the UX is doing its job really well.
They're not (necessarily) optimising for you searching for products or finding more detail about products, they're optimising for you buying the products. They very likely care zero if you did the former elsewhere, because why would it affect them if you did or not, you still bought with them.
They're great for point of sale, terrible for product discovery as a direct result of the UI. That's fine for most products where you can research what you want to buy then purchase on Amazon anyway (because free 1/2-day shipping), but it means services like Prime Video are terrible to use compared to Hulu/Netflix.
Which is a shame, since I think their originals and content library is really solid. It's just impossible for you to discover it without a huge ad campaign.
Trying to differentiate UI and UX in the context of a web app makes no sense. Both are two sides of the same coin. In your own comment, you couldn't even come to a conclusion as to where one ends and the other begins!
This is the hallmark of a buzzword. When a phrase like UX comes to describe everything and nothing at the same time it ceases to have meaning.
Good UI seems to be a "know it when I see it" but I'm not convinced a good UX exists yet (or even could exist?) otherwise all applications would use the same methodology
For instance, how is Prime 2-day shipping not considered part of the purchasing experience?
Every interaction you have with a business in any capacity is an "experience." How then, can you have employees who are tasked with everything? Conversely, by definition, isn't everybody in the company then a UX person?
UX is everything and nothing depending on the agenda of the person using the term. It's a buzzword.