Bad UX Bites #2: Amazon quick view

They spent less time thinking about it than you will spend on this page.

Jason Clauss

Published in

UX Planet

2 min read

Feb 5, 2019

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Scenario: You are visiting Amazon’s homepage and you see a row of books that they are recommending to you. One of them catches your eye, but not quite enough for you to commit to going to the book’s page. Fortunately, there is a “Quick View” option. That might give you a synopsis of the book sufficient for you to decide if you want to look any further into it.

Then, when you click it, this is what you get:

Not a single word of description. This piece of crap modal spends more pixels on telling you about similar books (including the one you’re already looking at!) than the product you’re supposed to be “quick viewing”.

In this proposed redesign, that took me 3 minutes, I demonstrate just how much space was wasted in the original.

I have always been flummoxed by Amazon’s UX design, but from what I read, it can be attributed to their obsession with A/B testing over actual design. As this example handily demonstrates, your dopey algorithms cannot design for shit and no amount of money will change that.

Important lessons

White space is good but wasted space is not.
Wasted time is even worse. Don’t waste users’ time.
When a user clicks something, they should get what they were expecting.