Amazon.com’s outrageously busy and crowded home page.
Amazon.com is not a model for site design, layout and usability. In these areas, it fails many tests.
When I told this to the audience of some 300 at last month’s IABC International Conference in Washington, D.C., (see The Site Is Right 2005) I was not surprised when I was challenged.
“How can you say that?” exclaimed one woman. “You can’t argue with Amazon’s success!”
Amazon.com’s success is largely due to its first mover status, unparalleled selection, innovative technology and entrepreneurial approach (strategy), and last but not least, it’s brand.
Amazon’s success is in spite of usability short-comings – which are many on the Amazon.com site. This success proves an important point: usability takes a backseat to strategy and content when determining web success (Ward’s Principal #1).
This principal is equally true on the corporate intranet. However, most websites and intranets don’t enjoy the resources that make Amazon successful in the absence of adherence to key usability principals.
As Jakob Nielsen put it in his most recent Alertbox column regarding Amazon.com, “Many design elements work for Amazon.com mainly because of its status as the world’s largest and most established e-commerce site. Normal sites should not copy Amazon’s design.
Notwithstanding the importance of strategy and planning (see the Nexus of Intranet Success) usability should not be over-looked as it’s particularly important to the intranet.
You’ll forgive usability gurus for harping on the life-or-death necessity of user friendly sites as they champion the usability cause with good reason. Users don’t see strategy and process. Users see the tangible qualities of a website and particularly cry aloud when access to those tangible assets is impeded.
In fact, the number one complaint of intranet users is: “I can’t find anything.” It’s the number one complaint in any intranet survey or focus group I’ve ever conducted.
The number one user priority is speed. Users want to get at the information they want as quickly as possible. This speed of information access is often severely impeded on an organically and/or decentralized intranet that usually plays poor cousin to the Internet site. This challenge was reinforced by yet another client and its users when conducting intranet focus groups for a large consumer package company in Chicago today.
Case in point: time and time again users tell me that they don’t mind scrolling down pages if it’s content they’ve sought out. However, on an intranet home page, they don’t want any scrolling. They want to glance at the home page to see what’s new and then quickly retrieve whatever information they are seeking. Employees don’t want to scroll down and they don’t want to guess at what they may be missing ‘below the fold.’ This is almost a unanimous finding amongst intranet users in the dozens of focus groups I’ve conducted – regardless of industry or company size.
However, using Amazon.com as the comparison, its home page contains about four screens of extremely busy and crowded content.
Yet despite this critical usability faux pas (and there are many on the Amazon.com site), Amazon is still a huge success.
Amazon.com proves that strategy and content are critical ingredients in developing a successful online presence. However, unless you enjoy the resources, brand and patents that Amazon enjoys, usability should never be overlooked.
