connecting*the*dots

Just the other day I found myself on a 10 hour trip home from New Jersey. Normally, the drive kills me, but thankfully, I had hours upon hours of Echo Chamber Project podcasts sitting to my right. When I made it home at 3:00am (I missed the damn turn at 85-440), I plopped on the couch and fired off a note to Kent Bye, thanking him for the virtual company.

Well, Kent got back in touch the next day and asked if I’d like to chat over Skype. Here’s the result (part of the audio becomes scrambled for 30 seconds, twice).

I noticed something the other day about my online shopping pattern: I don’t browse and I hardly ever buy on a whim.

After contemplating such startling, introspective findings for awhile (uhm… finished), I started to wonder whether this could be the case with most people that shop online? That got me to thinking more, so I mosied on over to Amazon.com to perform an off the cuff user interview/usability study of myself and my tendencies, comparing them to the holistic user experience of the site.

I admit it wasn’t very scientific, but what I discovered was interesting.

• When I shop at Amazon, 99 times of 100 (I multiplied this session by 99) go directly to the search field and enter a product attribute.
• After landing on a results page, I choose a product description page.
• 4 out of 10 times (ballpark figures folks), I’ll review a few user comment reviews on the product as a the final check before deciding to make a purchase or not.
• If it’s a go, then WHAM! I’m in the cart experience and out the virtual door.

What I just described is the Amazon shopping experience from 1996-97. It’s a utilitarian approach and it fits me when it comes to shopping, especially in the real world (but that’s a whole other conversation.)

Online shopping, for me, is about keeping your recommendations to yourself, don’t clutter the page with collaborative filtered data such as ‘purchase circles’ or ‘listmania,’ and just let me find what I’m looking for and get me out of the store… fast.

My assumption is that this is how most people use Amazon. I could be wrong. I’ve been known to be… often. But if that were the case, even if the numbers were only 30% that followed my shopping pattern, wouldn’t the overall user experience be a bit too much? Wouldn’t Amazon be relying too much on quirky collaborative filtering techniques to become the next generation shopping experience?

I mean, first there’s a welcome page, then the Sean store, then a trailing history of what I’ve viewed, then recommendations built dynamically based on those views and presented throughout the UI. On top of all of this there is untargeted and targeted marketing messaging (hmm, sometimes in the form of recommendations?) presented to me at each turn…

Who’s handling the UXdesign here? How many marketing MBA’s are in a room with a cornered IA or DBA hatching plots to create cross-pollination of product silos? Come on, do I really care that people who bought my book also wear clean underwear from Target? Is this the smartest Amazon can be?

Amazon deserves credit for recently removing some of the superfluous features of the site from the main experience and placing them into the well hidden ‘explore’ category on a secret page somewhere in their navigation scheme. But the powerful information that this site could provide the customer should be generated at the customer’s whim.

Please, Mr. Bezos, we’re living in the realm of customization. Allow us to create our own product page. Let us choose if we want these extra features and how we want to view them. I understand there’s a fine line between satisfying the needs of your retail partners and pushing product, but when in doubt, bite the bullet and go with the us, the people, the customers.

Amazon is now six years old, the ancient mother of e-commerce sites. Now would be the time to design an experience for individual shoppers. Create a completely personalized shopping experience through customizable interaction design. It’s the next step in online shopping, and you know how the saying goes in the retail world: the customer is always right.