Sharing the “Design Treasures from the Amazon”

This Thursday I attended my first Interaction Design Association Los Angeles (IxDA LA) event in Burbank, hosted at Yahoo!, featuring guest speaker, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering (UIE). Mr. Spool presented “Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon,” a close-up look at the clever yet strategic innovation seen on Amazon.com.

Amazon is often copied in terms of visual design and development because it seems so simple to imitate, but others are rarely as successful. Despite this, there are several key concepts that we can take away. Here are the 4 treasures:

1) Engage Through Content

It starts with reviews – both good reviews and bad reviews. Amazon realizes that reviews help people make decisions about the products they’re browsing, which leads to more products sold. So they’ve gotten really good at making sure that reviews can be found and compared or contrasted. For example, according to Spool, the question “Was this review helpful?” is calculated to be responsible for roughly $2.7 billion in revenues because it allows Amazon to mine user-generated content and serve it up again. Think about your content-strategy.

2) Don’t Fear New Ideas

Be open to experimenting – lots of it – and be ok with failing. Experiments are just that and sometimes they just don’t work out, but that’s okay. Amazon is constantly trying new things out and some stick, but a lot don’t or they just don’t work the way they were intended to work. The key is that their wild experimentation is mitigated by very careful, thoughtful implementations, rolled out slowly over time, so as to not disrupt the ‘machine.’ The multiple variations of the ‘Add to My Cart’ function is one example of how they’ve introduced subtle changes that are nearly imperceptible to most users. And the thing about Amazon is that they have so much traffic, it doesn’t take much time to turn on/turn off experimental features and capture feedback from a large, qualified sample of people.

3) Eliminate Tool Time to Deliver Confidence

No…. not like Tim the Toolman Taylor. Essentially, don’t make it difficult or require extra work for people to use your site and buy your product. Let your customer spend as much time as possible in Goal Time rather than Tool Time. Goal Time is the time your customer spends THINKING about the item they wish to buy. Tool Time is the time they spend “kind of” moving forward, but not really doing anything that contributes to their ultimate goal for being there in the first place (examples: struggling with security questions and password protected barriers or muddling through major redesigns (ahem…Facebook).

4) Never Forget about the Business

Amazon has a very deliberate business plan. There’s no magical reason why they can charge slightly less for the exact product that a manufacturer or big box retailer is selling you down the cyber road. And no, it’s not because Amazon can get a big volume discount. Go ahead, look up the iPod Nano on Apple, Best Buy, then Amazon. How do they do it?? They use a “Negative Operating Cycle” which means they collect money from you, Ms or Mr. Buyer, before they have to pay those guys – Big Brand Manufacturer. Amazon flips its inventory every 20 days…in a world that’s on a traditional 45 day retail billing cycle.

Most other e-tailers operate with Cash Debt, whereas Amazon operates on Cash Float. Because they can turnover their product faster (and have made it their mission to do so since the early days), Amazon makes more money before they have to pay their bills, and can take your money and use it for other stuff. No accident. Sounds familiar…kind of like….oh yeah, the bank? So Amazon has made extra sure that the site works the way it does to fit this business model, getting product sold and shipped as soon as possible.

The underlying caveat to all these tidbits is that just because it works for Amazon, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work on any other ecommerce site. Know your users, your use cases, your products and really understand how your buyers shop.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, you can also listen to & watch Jared Spool’s entire presentation on Slideshare.