I was reading here yesterday how all the big players do A/B testing on their web sites. Several current Amazon employees chimed in to say you can't get the simplest of changes through without running an A/B test to ensure it works as least as well with the general population as what came before. Which means of course that Amaozon's web site is highly tuned for the "average" user.
I am unabashedly one of the more techie users Amazon likely to have using their shopping site. I find the search and browse functions so appallingly bad at returning what you asked for (as opposed to things Amazon thinks they might be able to sell you - if I wanted those products I would have search for them for Pete's sake) I've given up using the Amazon home page entirely.
And yet clearly most of the world loves it. One explanation is: how weird am I? The other explanation is this obsession with A/B testing is dragging them towards some local minima that excludes me and a lot of others as well. I'm going with that one.
A third option is that they are so successful for reasons unrelated to their UI, and that the A/B testing is actually just not having the desired effect of creating a good UI.
For example, it could easily be the case that A/B testing is causing them to introduce changes that have a short term positive effect (such as more people buying a product when they visit the site, or even just changes that have a temporary "novelness" factor which wears off after they've been in use for awhile), but a long term negative effect (such as a gradually built dislike of the site causing them to be more likely to shop elsewhere a year or two down the line), and only the former shows up.
would be nice if they'd let you choose which sort of algorithms or UI you want. not necessarily that you should have a hundred choices, but having 3-4 'personas' that they could still tune/a/b test against. I suspect they may do this already for various geographies/countries anyway... ?
I am unabashedly one of the more techie users Amazon likely to have using their shopping site. I find the search and browse functions so appallingly bad at returning what you asked for (as opposed to things Amazon thinks they might be able to sell you - if I wanted those products I would have search for them for Pete's sake) I've given up using the Amazon home page entirely.
And yet clearly most of the world loves it. One explanation is: how weird am I? The other explanation is this obsession with A/B testing is dragging them towards some local minima that excludes me and a lot of others as well. I'm going with that one.