Amazon.com’s Information Design is Still Bad
Chris Ridgeway | 21 Jan 2012 | 16:18Ready for a (really) long scrolling post with not much more than a minor, un-life-altering rant? Perfect.
Just a note from floating on the web on a Saturday morning. Today, Amazon seems to be rolling out yet another visual update (beta-tested earlier?); my Amazon home page looks a even more sparse than usual. It made me think about how much their information hierarchy and resulting customer experience have been sorta both the best and the worst of the web over the years.
A decade ago, Amazon.com used the be the very model of the new, data-driven, intelligently easy-to-use website. It had perfect “just in time” links and seemed to know where you want to go. Their tabs interface from the late 90sand into the 2000s was widely copied.

Credit: www.lukew.com | Amazon Tabs in the late 90s
These days, Amazon.com remains one of the top retailers in the US ($18.5 billion), but its website is a glut of chocked together, un-curated information presented in long scrolling pages. Over the last several years they’ve tried to recover, and definitely have done better work on cleaning up the main page. Today they did it again, simplifying the top two inches and giving higher preference to a google-like search bar. All other options are hidden back into drop-down menus.
The Real Problem: The Product Page
The problem is that most of their attention has gone to cleaning up their front page, which I spend very little time on. 80% of the time, I google for a book or product I’m looking for, and jump straight through the search results to the Amazon product page. Then I jump from product to product.
And let’s be honest, the product pages really are pretty bad. Some key features shine (like “Search Inside” for books) and fortunately the pricing (for book editions at least) is cleanly displayed. But the rest of the page is a disordered, redundant mess of widgets demarcated only by dashed lines and populated by unreliable data.
For instance, I just searched for an iPhone (yep, got one of those now) charger. USB Sync and Charging Cable Compatible with Apple iPhone (White) came up first. (It’s .78 cents. I’m guessing because of the price the vendor will make up the cost in shipping charges. I had clicked on it because it was Amazon Prime eligible, but of course, that didn’t come up first: I’ll have to find the Prime price. But I digress.)
Is this the charger I want?? Maybe. Maybe I’ll get help to decide by s c r o l l i n g d o w n…

(ps – clicking on screenshots quickly zooms in)













