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Comment by __Joker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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