Hall of Fame: Amazon.com

Amazon.com

I would like to nominate Amazon.com to the Hall of Fame for their user friendly design and business ingenuity. Although, I must admit that the business ingenuity may not necessarily benefit the user. It is still interesting how Amazon.com can create an invisible under-layer to calculate how to keep a user on their page without the user ever really noticing. Amazon.com’s reason for creating a sticky webpage (a webpage that keeps the users on their page for as long as possible) is because it increases the probably that an item will be purchased. We will examine the different ways Amazon makes their site as user attractive and buyer friendly as possible through initial (base) HTML design, dynamic page creation, and knowledge of how their users behave.

If you open up the Amazon.com site, you will notice that most of their non-links and non-title text is black on white. Their title text is orange on white because it highlights the headers without making it difficult for the users to see (like yellow on white). User sensitivity to color is an important thing, a site lacking aesthetics with clashing colors can very easily turn away users. In this case, their tab bar is a fading shade of blue, which is complementary to the orange header text. They make sure to mostly stick with primary colors due to the fact that PCs and Macs can sometimes have color discrepancies and they do their best to accommodate user that still using 8-bit monitors. Amazon.com sections off links on their page using borders instead of different color shadings since it has been shown in studies that people can organize grouped information better if is contained within a box over if its background is shaded. They also make tabbed links across the top to make sure that the user can always find their way back to the original pages they came from. Now, one may think that everyone going on Amazon.com will get the same site, however, what most people are not aware of is that Amazon.com is a dynamically created webpage.

A dynamic webpage is a webpage that keeps track of each user that visits their site and when their system identifies a user that has used their site in the past. Records of which items the user looked at, which items were put on their wish list, and which items the user purchased are all kept on their servers. Moreover, they use the user’s cookies to store a lot information on that user so that the next time the user goes back, Amazon.com looks at your cookies and identifies you are the same user as before. From this information Amazon.com generates personalized pages geared towards each particular user and their interests. Double bundle deals and certain discounts for common items are generated so that they may entice the user to purchase more things from Amazon.com. In addition, they take advantage of the user’s desire to be similar to others and tell them how many people like them just purchased that item (it is a sort of reassurance technique to make the user feel like they understand trends and that they are not eccentric). Recently, they added ‘tags’ so that users can input keywords, to find items they have a tendency to drift towards. So, these tags will also contribute in dynamically building pages to suit the user. As fancy as dynamic webpage building is, there are a few other tricks Amazon uses because they understand how their users tend to work.

Amazon.com’s users have access to the internet, so it is safe for them to assume that users have visited other internet pages and possibly other online stores. If you notice in all online stores, they tend to follow the same ad hoc rules. Shopping cart in the top right corner and links will always be blue. One may notice that some other personalized sites have different colored links, but Amazon makes sure to stay with the convention (all links are blue) so no one gets confused. In fact, many sites like Amazon do tests on their site to see how often users will click on text or accidentally miss buttons (if they probability is too high, they make slight changes to their site –for example: increase the button size- so that users will never miss the button). Another user behavior that Amazon.com has studied is that internet users tend to ‘pogo’ through internet sites. They look for something by continuously going link after link until they reach a point where they want to go back to their original page, so they start hitting the ‘back’ button. Amazon makes it easy for us to retrace our steps by creating tabs at the top of the page so that you can go back to the home page much more quickly than if you were to continuously back space.

When purchasing something from Amazon, one thinks to click on the little cart in the top right corner. What most people do not realize is that Amazon had multiple ways to do the same thing on the same page; especially when it comes to time to check out and purchase the item. In addition to the shopping cart at the top, there is a button on the side next to the wish list, ‘add to shopping cart’ which will take you to your shopping list, and there is a My Cart link at the bottom of the page, in case you get lost and just decide to purchase whatever you have at the moment.

Another thing that is interesting to note is that Amazon’s bundle deals have been moved up higher to the top so as to attract the users, in the past (the product information and product customer reviews used to be higher up on the page. But as time passed, they have increasingly added more advertisements for other products (related to the product you are currently purchasing) closer to the top and pushed customer reviews to the bottom. One can theorize that t hey did this because customer reviews can be fickle and Amazon.com can never be sure that the reviews will be good. Sometimes the impulse buyer may never notice the customer reviews if they never reach the lower parts of the product page, so they will end up purchasing the item (as opposed to un-buying the item if they catch sight that the product is not good).

So as you can see, Amazon.com put a lot of thought into how to design their page to increase the probability of their consumers purchasing something from their site. While we may be indignant at the thought that they are able to maneuver us into buying more products than we initially planned on buying. Nevertheless, it is still very interesting in how there is a science to ‘internet shopper behavior’ and how Amazon.com has built a sort of efficient algorithm to entice their audience the best way they can. Because it is not just simply building an attractive site, it is building a site that is intelligent and caters to the things in which we desire and it takes into account that we are internet users who have brought knowledge over from visiting other sites and may apply that knowledge upon looking at their own site.