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Comment by winterbe | Hacker News Reader

Still no autofocus on the search input. After 20 years? Really? You have to press 15x TAB in order to start searching. This bothers me since 2001 when I ordered from Amazon for the first time.

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Really doubt this would have not crossed the designer or caught while A/B testing. May be lot of people don't do a search after landing on the home page. I for one hate sites which have auto-focus on every page, breaks up and down arrows and sometimes the backspace. At least there are two chrome plug-ins for auto-focusing on the search bar.

I guess that 99.9% just use the search input to the find the stuff they are looking for. What else could you do? Clicking through product categories?

BTW: UP/DOWN arrows and Backspace is redundant. Just use PAGE UP/DOWN or CMD LEFT (chrome, mac osx) for back.

At the very least the search input should be focusable by clicking tab ONCE... not 15 times.

EDIT: The whole Tab Order just makes no sense at all:

1. Try Prime 2. Sign In 3. Try Prime 4. Wish List 5. Shopping Cart 6. Departments 7. Fire & Kindle 8-14. No visible focus 15. Search input

I bet this has NEVER been A/B tested.

SPACEBAR is heavily used as PGDOWN. Auto-focus ruins that. I use SPACEBAR that way on nearly every site, so let's not talk about anecdata like it's concrete best practice UX.

So do I, but that's fixable with a little bit of JS, given that you're not going to start a search query with a space.

I do this too. Pressing tab one time to escape auto focused inputs is not a big deal to me.

Pressing tab one time usually lands you either on another form field or the actual submit button, which hitting the spacebar would submit.

Autofocus is great on search engine homepages or search-oriented sites. Amazon isn't search-oriented when on the site. They assume their recommendations are usually spot on enough that you'll click through a percentage of the time, or that you googled straight into the product page (as most people do).

The CMD + LEFT and CMD + RIGHT are the ones that get me when sites autofocus. Being focused on a text entry changes those from forward/back in the browser's history to moving the cursor to the beginning/end of the line. It can be incredibly frustrating.

My favorite sites are the ones that don't autofocus, but have a keyboard shortcut (usually '/') that focuses on search. But then I love anything that behaves like vim/less.

Try and search for [microwave oven]. The results suck, especially if sorted by price.

Click through the categories. You get much better results. (Not on mobile).

Clicking through categories takes way to much time. Just type in the search then use filters on the left sidebar to further tweak the results.

I'd imagine most people are getting to category pages via google searches.

I actually use google to find products on Amazon ( using site: ). Works just fine.

> Still no autofocus on the search input.

Even more annoyingly, if you are quick to click in the search field and start typing when the main page load, some late-loading JS causes the focus to be lost so I end-up typing nowhere.

I think it might be that pointless 'Department' menu on the right that causes this.

Or it'll only catch half of what you typed. Very annoying indeed.

Autofocus breaks scrolling with the keyboard, especially spacebar. It can also mess with screenreaders and blind users.

So you prefer to scroll down the landing page of amazon which is full of product advertising with your keyboard instead of having a sensible way of searching? Really?

At least the search should be focusable by pressing TAB once instead of 15 times, which is insane.

I have a sensible way of searching. It's called typing "Amazon xxxxxx" into my browser/search engine of choice

We run a large-ish webshop, our experience is that most users doesn't search, they browse.

Some users will of cause use the search box, but the majority clicks their way to the products they want using the menus. Amazon may have seen something similar, so not doing the auto-focus might make more sense, I doubt very much that they haven't considered it.

I'm curious why you would want to navigate to the Amazon homepage to make a search - wouldn't you just search from the URL bar? In Chrome, at least, doing so is trivial after your first search.

Searching in the URL bar is fine, but

- that's traditionally done by people who can' tell the difference between a search and a URL so I avoid it

- depending on what exactly you mean (a normal search with "site:", or the prefix "a Harry Potter" for an amazon-search), and which settings are active, this may be a privacy concern; in many instances the special URL bar sends all text back to Google

- generally, certain services (not Google) like to substitute things for their own products; theoretically the browser could redirect to or advertise a different bookseller

- theoretically sites like Amazon could provide a nice starting point for search based on my interests / history

How about this; don't autofocus on search, but listen for key presses at document level, and if the first key is alpha-numeric, then autofocus on search (and prefill what was typed so far). Allows quick search and doesn't break up/down key navigation.

If it bothers you that much you could just write a Chrome plugin/Greasemonkey script.

hahah, I just did that today. Wanted to search for air mattresses. Tried to tab a couple times, that didn't work. I can't really think of what they are losing by putting the cursor in the search field by default. And, it seems like they gain a bunch from a usability perspective.

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