Finally, I agree with Jakob Nielsen about Amazon and E-Commerce Design. At last. It has been a very long time since we last agreed. Way back in the mid 90’s I was a great fan. I enjoyed his Usability Engineering and his ‘guerrilla’ approaches. He was a real pioneer back then, a tech made good. But I have found his later work to be turgid and repetitive, with no real new insights. In Usability as Behaviourism? I have described his approach as reminiscent of behaviorism, treating users as black boxes with no considered emotions or cognitions, just like rats in a maze.

But, Mr J, I’m with you on this one. For too long we have held up Amazon as the gold standard for web retail. And now its backlash time! Read the Jakob’s post for the full story, but I paraphrase by saying: cluttered with content and links, marred by featuritis, over-exposed with toys, music, video, software etc., hence poor browsing and the rest.

We should, however, give credit. Amazon really has been that good for that long. It did good e-commerce and provided many many people with their first online purchase. Alongside ebay and google it formed a holy trinity for the dot com era, and rode out the dot com crash.

But back then, it only sold books. And just to people who knew what books they wanted. The clever bit, Seth Godin’s ‘free gift’, was that although it was a website, it made very personal recommendations that we liked. Just like a small store owner or a friend that knew us might do. But although that still pertains, many other sites do similar things now, and Amazon has got cluttered with much other stuff.

You can still buy books you know you want there, though, and I still do and still will. I suppose my point today is that along with Jakob, we think that it’s time for some new thought. Time to roll over, Amazon, and time to get some fresh ideas out there, new and innovative. Time for some new brand new tomorrows.

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