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Comment by jason_shah | Hacker News Reader

Amazon really blows me away with their end-to-end experience. The funny thing is that their site's UX leaves much to be desired, but it's highly functional and they still have a world-class brand even without a world-class frontend for Amazon.com. We obsess over our web app's front-end design, but often neglect the end-to-end experience.

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Their site's UX is amazing. The aesthetic design could use some work, but the actual interaction and interface design on amazon is pretty great.

Their goal isn't to look pretty, it's to sell stuff. There have been many times when i've been looking at something on amazon, clicked the one-click purchase button, and then hours later realized i wasn't really sure i wanted to buy it, Amazon just makes it far too easy to give them my money.

Compare their site to Newegg for purchasing computer hardware. Newegg's filtering system blows Amazon's away, making it possible to easily find what you are looking for.

Amazon likes to give me similar hardware when I search for a part, cluttering up the results with things I don't want. If I search for a 7850 GPU, I don't want results for a 6950, 7950, 6870, 7770, 7870, Intel 3570K CPU, GTX 670, Intel 2500K CPU, GTX 480, 6850, GTX 560 Ti, and GTX 560. That was all just on the first page of search results.

Granted, you do want similar products in other cases, but the same kind of failure applies elsewhere.

Another annoying thing is the duplicate items as separate listings. Sometimes I will go and look for something like a Water Filter replacement and find 3 or 4 different listings for the product with multiple sellers under each.

Using Amazon to find a specific product is an unpleasant experience. Thankfully once you find the product you are looking for everything else is great.

Could you elaborate on how you think their site's experience leaves much to be desired despite being highly functional? I'm having trouble thinking of any time when I thought to myself "boy, I hate the process Amazon makes me take to do this task" and isn't that really what it's all about?

That's true in many ways. The actual site's UX isn't bad per se because it's pretty easy to find what you want, buy it, manage the order, etc. And yes, that's what "it's all about" at the end of the day.

I think I was caught in a little bit of Silicon Valley myopic thinking since their site isn't shiny and that's what is mistakenly considered as interchangeable with good UI design these days. That being said, Amazon.com the site does still need to improve UX in a couple key areas. Compared to more contemporary e-commerce sites, the ability to compare items and make sense of ratings (i.e. the flaws of the 5 star rating system) is where they need to make the most improvement IMHO.

It may have been an overstatement to say "their site leaves much to be desired" in all fairness.

It seems like there are easy improvements to search by ratings they could make. If I am browsing for a new book, I'd like to be able to search by number of reviews alone. Anything with more than 500 or so reviews is probably worth taking a look at. I also would like to filter out items with less than 'x' reviews or search by a ratio of number of reviews to the number of stars. This might hurt products trying to get off the ground, but I'd really like it as a user.

The main area I have complaint with is the discovery process for finding digital videos to watch. Once you've used something like Netflix, the Amazon process is awful.

Oh, good point, this is definitely true. I have Prime, but Netflix is so much easier to find stuff on (or even remember that there's stuff there to find) that I've never used any of the included free Amazon video stuff.

It's difficult to comparison-shop for features; Amazon reviews are now the definitive source of consumer opinion, but you have to sort of agglomerate your own set of W-X, X-Y, Y-Z and X-Z comparisons to see why people chose one over the other (and account for the fact that all four of those reviews were on models that have since been replaced).

I buy a fair bit of stuff from Amazon, but it's hard for me to spend more than 10 minutes on the site without wanting to punch the monitor. Now, don't get me wrong. I love the attention to detail in every other part of their business. It's just their website (and similar things, like the abysmal Amazon MP3 app for Android) that are the problem.

I hate that I need to log in 3 times within the space of 5 minutes as I hit different parts of the site that apparently are considered more and more sensitive.

I hate the way they keep on misleadingly suggesting that items might be eligible for free shipping when they aren't (every possible signal from the user profile to ip geo-location should be indicating that I'm the wrong country for that).

I despise the way they keep on defaulting me back to paying in the wrong currency with their rip-off "amazon currency converter" with worse exchange rates than my credit card.

I can't believe that in this day and age they aren't able to synchronize anything except the most rudimentary profile data across their different domains. So the US site will keep on recommending a DVD I've already bought off the UK site, and the UK one will nag me about rating a book that I've already rated on the US one.

That's just a few things off the top off my head, not some long held grudge list.

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