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Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

The multiple download buttons is not a dark pattern to prevent you from downloading your data, it’s just bad UX, it’s a feature you add to check a legal box and it doesn’t get priority for usability. Probably someone just shrugged, this is good enough and moved on. They should definitely give you it all in one zip file but “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a developer rushing to get something done by making it just barely usable” (the fact I worked at AWS as a development manager has nothing to do with the above and is solely my opinion)

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Is the ridiculously annoying process for ending your Prime subscription also just accidental, bad UX?

It miraculously uses very similar patterns.

True, and the ridiculously easy process to accidentally sign up for a subscription to each of your smallest of purchases.

It makes sense that Amazon would dedicate resources to making the sign up processes easier because it actually makes them more money compared to making the cancelling easier. That would be a waste of time to work on.

Do the excuses ever end?

> It makes sence that Amazon would entirely forget to provide 'cancell subscribtion' button and will keep taking your money forever'

If the developers felt rushed to make such a feature that is the fault of their management but given the history of Amazon which includes publicly facing service status boards that don't update unless senior management approve the outage it is more likely that Amazon doesn't really want people to know what they know about their users.

> it’s just bad UX

"Bad" I would say means you can still achieve your task.

I was presented with over sixty download links, and not being an idiot or someone to be taken for a ride, I refused to go along with it, and that means the UI is not bad but failed.

What's more, it OBVIOUSLY failed.

There's no way a single person at Amazon could have genuinely sat there and thought, "yes, this, THIS is it, THIS is the right way to make this page", not, that is, if their goal was the user actually getting hold of their data.

Ok well, the same thing could be said by any organization in the world regarding any dark pattern ascribed to them.

As far as never ascribing, if a company is super big and rich and would find it beneficial if people give up trying to do something because of bad UX I think it's a reasonable assumption that the bad UX is an example of a dark pattern. Otherwise this helpful concept to describe actual things that companies do to tire out users and get them to relent in doing things the companies don't want done would have to disappear.

TLDR: If what Amazon is doing here isn't a dark pattern, what is?

Even if this were the case, it'd still be customer time neglicience. This is one of the largest companies in the world

This is unnaceptable given how inportant user interface is the rest of the site. one click shopping

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