For those who are curious, Amazon uses a backend service to control what you see. They randomly hash your customer ID (which you can never see) and then assign you to a bucket. It's a sophisticated A/B testing framework that then allows them to measure and compare pretty much everything about the two buckets of people. They can allocate people between A/B pretty dynamically. Most rollouts start with 5% of people and move up from there. Since it's tied to your customer ID, they can retroactively go look at any other variables they didn't think to look at initially just by knowing whether you were an A or a B and the times when you were in which.
It's also important to be a "random" hash because you have hundreds or thousands of these experiments going on at the same time, and you want to rule out spurious relationships (e.g. other experiments being a confounding factor).
What metric do they use to evaluate the success of an A/B test? Generally straight revenue, though sometimes average order size or category spend will enter into the mix, too.
Amazon uses cookies to track which site design you have seen last.
They are constantly redesigning their pages (I've seen up to 4 completely different versions of a page in use at the same time). They have to lock the design through cookies (otherwise you would be seeing a different design on every refresh).
No, I'm also in Germany, got the new site right away. Opened amazon.de in another tab to compare the changes made. Now we'll see how long it takes until amazon.de changes as well.
Not sure about this. I'm on the same network as my boyfriend. Yesterday he pointed out that amazon.com looked different. I'm on my laptop and it's not showing the new design.
Yep, I'm seeing the same redesigned page. I get the new page with Chrome (OS X) both logged-in and incognito, and also with Safari, but I see the old page in Firefox.
The second part is my reason I even bother to look at product pages. Ratings, comments - most helpful and most critical.
The Wirecutter and other special sites put this context as a centerpiece.
There is a lot of crap, let us help you order the best.
I wonder if I am such an outlier for Amazon - their homepage does not put "the best" into display. The whole social/ratings aspect is not getting a lot of love at all.
Those comments replaced the helpful store clerk, especially now that those no longer exist irl. I ordered a trailer hitch and a user comment told me to swap a screw with a pin for easier detachment - super stuff.
Presumably, Amazon is very good at SEO. If you're landing on their home page, you're an exception; most people will land directly on product pages, comparison pages, review pages, shopping list pages, sale pages, etc. The home page, then, is for people who type "amazon.com" into their browser directly, because they want to see what the site is about. Putting user-generated content there might not be putting their best foot forward, especially if it's in the form of plain-old boring text rather than eye-catching glossy product photos. Reviews are one click away from any of those product-photo links, but users have to show an initial commitment to spend at least 30 seconds clicking around before Amazon will show them anything that might bore them, like walls of review text.
I don't agree. My thoughts are more inline with the articles below on Amazon search vs Google search.
Amazon has some significant number of repeat customers who are buying from Amazon because that is their preferred shopping venue not because search (Google) is driving them to Amazon. To those customers the question is not, where can I buy X but which model/version of X do I buy from Amazon. When making the purchasing decision, the reviews are critical content not boring.
But you don't need to sell return customers on your service. The only thing Amazon needs to have on its page for these people (when they're logged out, remember) is the search box. Everything else is for the first-time visitors.
Those have been A/B tested for months, if not more than a year. I like it better than the current default that most people see; I wonder why they haven't fully committed to it yet.
A year is far longer than they would need just to achieve statistical significance. They've got over 160 million unique visitors per month [1]. Even showing the variants to only 1% of traffic you're working with over 50,000 visitors every day, enough to run large multivariate tests.
Amazon probably also has vested interest in how a change affects LTV which is way harder to understand than whether there was a purchase regression in a short time window.
Maybe for some things, but not necessarily for everything amazon cares about, such as performance and reliability. For both of those amazon doesn't really care about averages, they care about the 3 9's experience. If there's a 0.5% chance that page load will take longer than some small number of milliseconds then that's not good enough for amazon and they'll go back to the drawing board. Factor in bugs in the new layout being fixed during the A/B test (necessitating resetting statistics) and it's easy to see how it could take a year to fully roll out a big change given amazon's cautiousness.
Statistical significance is not the same as significance in business terms. I can't imagine anyone would use such an approach when deciding how much data to collect.
>Statistical significance is not the same as significance in business terms
Depending on the level of significance, why not? If it's expensive or simply not possible to gather the full data set, sampling is absolutely a valid basis for business decisions. Why wouldn't it be?
Sigh. So far they're only hiding text on the front page, but they're following a trend that's far worse than the flat fad. I need information, and unnecessarily huge product photos convey only a tiny fraction of the necessary information -- even when they're photos for the right thing.
As it stands, fewer total things fit on my screen at once, and they individually convey less information. I have to specifically roll over to see product names, prices, and ratings.
Stop treating text as an enemy to be eradicated. Text is the basis of modern civilization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I didn't believe it at first... Waaaow. On my side its 159 requests. Still a frickin huge number.
It's not like it's the only site that increases complexity with time. Is this really the future of the web? I was under the impression it will get lighter as it develops but no, everyone thinks it's better to stuff as much as they can into their web page. Sad.
I can't get to the redesigned page, but the old design is 240 requests, and that doesn't stop it from loading the home page in a couple seconds at most. Most of the requests must be non-blocking, non-essential to above-the-fold rendering.
The fixed header is actually pretty stupid when you think about it. More and more people are using 11" and 13" laptops, meaning that a fixed header takes up space that could be used for actual content. In some cases the size of the header means that users on small screen have to scroll endlessly.
It would make more sense to go back to having a left or right menu, if the goal is to utilise screen space better.
Fixed headers also break pressing space to page through a document - my usual way of reading the web. Space advances the viewport by one screen-height, but with a fixed header, not all of this screen-height is visible.
It will be interesting to compare amazon with Flipkart (in India, but growing quite big now.) Flipkart has largely followed Amazon's design. Yet, flipkart has better information handling and quicker searches. (And Amazon India site is noticeably slower these days when you visit product pages.)
I think the big difference is, how quickly they can change the home page experience to respond to business decisions. For example, flipkart has got a lot of attention in selling Redmi and other phones in "flash sales" - when potential users arrive at once. And flipkart has been amazing to make it easy for users to quickly access those product areas. When they ran big billion day recently, they had changed both their home page and mobile interface to reflect the right set of options and to easily navigate in the site. In general, amazon (Indian site) hasn't been able to put up similar experiences. During the same big billion advert days, even amazon also gave big press advertisements. However, they had hardly changed their home page for the visiting users to highlight the right deals.
But then, if they continue to focus on lower prices, who will care for better UI ?!
I've been shopping there for years so they must know me pretty well. I can't figure out why they have young women's dresses above the fold. Total miss. I'm logged in so they should be able to tie it all together.
Another silly thing they've shown me are the gag items. For example, you'll look at the banana slicer with stupid reviews once, and then later on they'll show you other items that other people interested in the banana slicer also viewed, but no one will actually buy [e.g., some $4000 book on distribution of toilets in China].
I'm getting baby halloween costumes, women's jewelry, and women's fall dresses. I'm a male without kids who doesn't crossdress. Huge waste to fill that space with things I don't want and never have wanted.
Looks like they gave their navigation bar more visual weight by darkening it.
They're following the convention Facebook is using for their nav bar, which I like. There's a logo, search, and utilities. This helps because many users expect the navigation to be next to the logo. On a behavioral level it creates a sense of comfort by establishing the security of routine/familiarity. The downside/trade off is by placing the elements side by side instead of on top of each other, it reduces scanability.
A lot of drop down menu options. Amazon does a good job with information scent and progressively disclosing more information in the drop down. This keeps the page from being cluttered and helps people navigate to their goal locations quicker and easier.
I like that they have the prices for their products right out front. You don't have to read more to find out. They give the people what they want to see right away.
I could go on with analysis of the design but now seems like a good stopping point.
I seem to remember Steve Yegge saying that not a pixel moved on the Amazon page without Jeff Bezos say so - and that had lead to a legion of designers simply resigning in frustration (I think it was along with the "makes ordinary control freaks look like hippy stoners" comment)
So what changed? Did Bezos mellow? Or did A/B testing reveal a vast amoun of money lying on the table?
I was at amazon for the last redesign. It's interesting the direction they are going. In the 1990s they went from nothing to selling everything, and things got more and more complicated. During my time, we simplified a lot of the layout and created the pop-up categories window (along with the search sidebar that lets you filter hard drives by capacity, etc.)
I'm not in the A/B test to see the new design here, but from images it sure looks like they are going simpler and simpler. Notice how the front page looks a lot more like the Apple Store than it did in the past?
I think it's a good trend... hiding complexity can add a great deal to usability.
They have a choice on the HP of showing stuff I might not know I want, i.e., less related to my history, or stuff I probably do want, i.e., related to my history. They are prioritizing /less than before/ the stuff related to my history. This is actually a shift in the direction of some of their competitors (if you can call them that), and has never been Amazon's style. It's a shift.
I'm disappointed they removed text. I'm also annoyed that typing in the search bar is afflicted by a delay probably due to a buggy script, possibly the one that makes all the images in each row flicker as they try to fit the row space again and again.
I agree 100%. It's far less usable than it was. The removal of text is yet another one of those silly design trends I'm sure we'll look back at with disdain in the near future.
Probably there were reasons to look like a bog-standard Wordpress template with a wide header image, but some character would be nice, though. I guess the real issues, however, are in the more frequented search and product pages. And they seem usable to me at the first look.
Fitting that this comes just after Bezos also finally does something overtly public with Blue Origin (last month's ULA deal press conference), and that both efforts still seem, relative to time invested & return at stake, remarkably lame.
Screenshot for anyone who isn't seeing the new page.