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Comment by throwayyy479087 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

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It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.

They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability.

For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.

> Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763

I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.

"It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_"

It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.

It's been ugly forever, and there have been several wholesale rewrites (C++ -> Perl -> Java, and JavaScript and whatever is in native apps)

Amazon ios app is pretty trash. I keep getting blank white screens, it has been this way for months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...

That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.

i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it

Probably not so much anymore..

its not what works, its whats good enough, or not bad enough to cause an obvious problem. well maybe thats what you mean by "works" i dunno

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