I’ve stopped trying to save by online ordering, within reason. If a store has what I need + points me in the right direction and demonstrates they are knowledgeable, they will get my business. 5-10 dollars is not worth saving at the expense of fuelling the enshittification machine. If that makes a huge difference to you, then reevaluate if you actually need the item
You’ll end up with less stuff, better stuff, with less hassle and noise, and a relationship to a vendor which may speed up returns and maintenance. As always, pick your poison
This is the natural, simple, user-friendly design I want.
Don't give me some bullshit instead.
So many modern UX issues are from people presuming what users want, rather than just giving them well-designed tools and getting out of the way.
E.g., would you know exactly the price range to pay for a tool set which lets you do general repairs around the house? Should it be ₹100? ₹500? How will a search engine know for sure that you’re an aware customer who knows their price ranges versus a newbie exploring the space? Even google claims to have millions of results per query meaning they, for all their talk about organising the world’s information, don’t know what exactly you want.
It’s all about trade offs and checkboxes(layovers, specific terminals, airlines, aircraft body types, price ranges, dates, non-stops, insurance, in-flight Wi-Fi, meals, early boarding) etc.
Do you first look through the page with all the options, then open different tabs with each unique combination of checkboxes and options enabled/disabled? That must exponentially (literally) harder than simply viewing fuzzy results on screen and pruning the decision tree in your head.
I input my source and destination and date and travel class and then choose from the listed results. At no point I would expect the website to show me business class if I chose economy. If I chose non-stop, I expect non-stop flights and nothing else.
You could offer me a flexible search option, as some sites do (+/- x days on flight times, etc.). Great! Now I can request that we search within a date range. Nice! That might be a good feature for some people!
Offering a simple query interface that returns what it says it will doesn't mean we can't offer flexible search parameters.
Flights are a terrible example of where I'd want to offer fuzzed results... having booked flights on the wrong day before, the last thing I want is to ask for X, but get offered Y.
Logically, you should want to control each of these variables while searching for flights. If you are ready to trust a flight aggregator with these choices, some fuzziness in price seems acceptable too.
You are probably thinking that you don’t want to make a choice about aircraft type or seating configuration and so, whatever the search engine shows in whatever order is fine by you. If so, consider that others might have the same ambivalence towards price fuzziness.
I.e. the UI needs to be there to efficiently help the user do what they ask not to try to be smarter than the user. Unless the user asks for fuzzy matches it doesn't make sense to make the response lead with them.
All those options (the ones I see anyway) are used, so when I limit the search to "Condition - New" they all go away.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/lazy-use-of-ai-leads-to-a...
All four of those non-Adidas hits are "Sponsored" results, but that's not particularly easy to notice (for one of them it's almost impossible).
I would agree with GP that Amazon product search often leaves much to be desired. It's hard to search for X without getting accessories for X, competitors to X, products that can be connected to X. This is annoying at best, and crippling if you want to, say, sort by price (all the cheapest matches will be accessories or otherwise not what you wanted).
Now that Amazon has captured user-share, they will (ineluctably) abuse user good-will (by padding search results with ad-placed products the user does not want) until they reach some marginal breaking point. The users that remain are either oblivious or cursed with a lingering taste of bad-faith and bullshit.
Eventually the giant will strangle itself in its sleep, but that's probably 50+ years out given how these things go.
I can see (because I was there discussing it back in 95) what the appeal of personalized search results could be for both sellers and consumers. But a few decades of that BS have fairly convincingly made the case that it is a horrible idea.
eg searching for 25GbE network cards shows a bunch of 2.5GbE network cards, and no amount of -"2.5GbE" nor "NOT 2.5GbE" options (and variations) gets rid of them. :(
Ebay though seems to work ok. :)
How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake
The problem is, they don't.
Would you believe what drives more sales and what you think you want could be different?
I'm sure Amazon does optimize results based on conversion, but only fools believe search results are optimal based on concrete criteria.
Also, some search results are clearly awful. Once I saw canned fish items showing up while searching for USB drives.
What's an associated seller?
Can you see where this would not work, or how it can be exploited ?