Ask HN: Just my eyes or did Amazon.com change their look? looks great to me

6 points·nomdeplume··4 comments

It's same here! (in India) but, it's visible only when I visit amazon from iPad.

a big change is coming according to TechCrunch, but it looks the same in Canada. Maybe you got an a/b test.

why not link to amazon as your title?

I always hated amazon page design. They have this disease where they try to put as much shit on the page as possible. Their home page is completely unreadable. I'm sure they A/B tested it to the stratosphere, but it doesn't work for me at all.

I've seen this happen on a very popular site, design-by-committee was responsible. It looks like amazon has the same problem. They ask designers to design something nice, but the requirements are insane - you have to shove 20 different blocks on a given page. Then they go through rounds of discussions in rooms full of project managers, product managers, designers, project leads, and often some executives (who for sure think they know better). They argue over and over, of what features should be on the page, while stabbing their political opponents' suggestions. It ends up in a clusterfuck like that.

EDIT: That's what it looks like to me:

Above the fold: http://i.imgur.com/X0xde.jpg

Below the fold: http://i.imgur.com/ldzIj.jpg

If a single web site will be responsible for the backlash against a/b testing it will be Amazon. The amount of cruft is mind-boggling, so much in fact that I used a custom CSS to make it usable again.

Here's how the page for a single book looks like when comparing Amazon's with my own CSS: http://imgur.com/a/lhWr5

Yes, it's the same page.

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