Is Amazon Overloaded?

Take a look at this fairly randomly chosen page on Amazon (picture crop above). It contains the following:

• 3262 words
• Over 220 links (not including links that appear on pop-out submenus which add over 60 more). This is as many links as Yahoo had on its homepage at is peak of link quantity a couple of years ago.
• There are zones for navigation, purchasing (with multiple sub-zones), reviews, user-generated content, a wiki, a discussion forum, automatically generated recommendations, recent history of Amazon searches, advertising, special offers.
• There are also 8 search boxes and 6 drop-down menus, 4 master navigation tabs, and 12 buttons related to adding things to the cart or a wish list.

There isn’t a whole lot of obvious order to how these are presented, and no strong grid to help organize content.

What’s funny is that it mostly works, despite having what would generally be considered an overload of content and distractions. The amount of stuff enourages a non-linear approach to reading the page, as your eyes zig-zag around as they catch onto baubels and buttons.

In some ways an Amazon page is very much like wandering around inside a Target store.

You’re not expected to take everything in in one go, but are offered enough enticements to keep you coming back for repeat visits, each time aquiring a deeper understanding of the shopping landscape. You trundle your shopping cart around and some things will catch your eye, adjacent choices will be offered, and so on.

The other thing it has in common with Target is that every product is treated the same, whether it costs $1 or $1000 (the price range on Amazon is different than Target…). Every product gets the same set of features, recommendations, search options, tagging, etc. (With exceptions made for items like books, which have special features like SIPs that aren’t relevant elsewhere).

But it does raise the question of how much more can be loaded onto an Amazon page. Or perhaps they will start taking things away? The product wikis don’t seem to get used much, and discussion forums and user-uploaded photos only show up occasionally and then mostly for high-emotional-involvement or hot categories. Even a pretty hot product that’s been on the market for a while, like the Razr, only has 2 discussion threads and no wiki entries. Given the lifecyle of many products, they will be off the market before having time to build up wiki/discussion momentum.

I suspect that we will soon see Amazon either start to trim back, or do a wholesale redesign to bring some order to the (almost) chaos. They haven’t had a full redesign in quite a few years and have been adding “Web 2.0” snazziness incrementally, it feels overdue. 

Comments

[Diana]

"There isn’t a whole lot of obvious order to how these are presented, and no strong grid to help organize content."

Typical large company design: there are multiple competing business units trying to get their features on these pages. And Bezos doesn't like grids. So they don't get applied.

"They haven’t had a full redesign in quite a few years and have been adding “Web 2.0” snazziness incrementally, it feels overdue."

Incrementally is all you'll ever see. Amazon is never going to do a big splash redesign, it's far too difficult to coordinate all the moving parts and it would be so disruptive to customers that they simply wouldn't even consider it.

[Abe Burmeister]

Interesting stuff. One important thing to look at with Amazon though is that as a web site they are capable and almost certainly do collect incredible amounts of data on who clicks on what and if and when it turns into a transaction. They are also capable of changing small parts of their site to test new designs and have been known to do so in the past. When Amazon adds a feature or changes a design they almost certainly have tested it on a portion of the site already and will continue to monitor it. You can rest assured that if they make change that significantly decrease their effectiveness in generating sales they'll reverse it soon enough.

One industry that's had the ability to directly measure design effectiveness in terms of sales is the direct mail marketing industry (where Karl Rove cut his teeth). And funnily enough in a lot of ways that's what Amazon's site looks like a piece of direct mail marketing. It may look horribly cluttered to someone like me who drinks the clean and simple design kool aid, but I suspect it's a surprisingly effective design. MySpace is another good example, it looks like a disaster but clearly it's highly effective in some way. Perhaps these sites are the true digital manifestation of desktop metaphor, they might not be neat, well planned or pretty, but they function a lot like piles of paper on a desk, you might not be able to explain why, but you certainly can find things.

Of course even the most effective piles need to be cleaned up and sorted from time to time, and that's pretty much a redesign...

[Peter]

Did you notice that like a year, a year and a half ago more or less they removed an entire sidenav from their product pages? Apart from the *buy* section, the product pages are now basically 1 column. Not cluttered at all, for me.

And I agree with the direct marketing comparison. It's tested, it just works.

[Dave Davis]

I'm with Diana: don't expect a facelift or redesign from Amazon any time soon, regardless of the clutter. First and foremost, the clutter is anything but chaos, as Abe suggests. All "features" and links have been well tested, not just against the population at large, but with respect to individual users. What you see on Amazon will be different than what I say, based on my browsing, and eventually, (Amazon hopes) buying predilections. Their site is one of the most aware on the net. More interesting still: they're currently marketing that awareness to all comers. So, I'd expect MORE clutter, not less, as their business model moves away from retail, and towards middlemanning.

That's not to say some features won't disappear. It's an evolutionary environment. Their wiki was born challenged by Amazon's existing commenting engine(s) and user features. Did those alternatives not exist, or were they absorbed by the wiki, it would certainly be more viable. As it exists it will sink or swim on it's own merits, and as such it's got a tough row to hoe, given the familiarity and power of the existing user comments. On a different system, the wiki might be given more of a head start... it would be seeded, again by absorbing or replacing the comments or something similar. But Amazon relies heavily on evolutionary pressure to "cook" it's code and features. So, unless some savvy users find an application for the wiki, it's more likely to disappear before it evolves, for the reasons Adam states (lacking content and users, short product cycles may well doom it!).

-d-

[Adam]

The direct mail comparison is a good one, hadn't thought of that. And yes, I'm sure they do lots of real-time testing to try out new features. I actually landed in one of their bucket tests not too long ago, with a different look to the front page. My wife was sitting next to me and when she looked at Amazon on her computer, it still had the old style. So I'm not second-guessing their testing, they've got the data, obviously I don't.

But it still seems to me they can't go much further down the add-more-stuff path in the current look.