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Why Does Amazon's Website Look Ugly?

Sam Parr uses Amazon as the example of bad design beating good design. A fashionable designer thinks good design means colors and a flat layout. The Kindle page is mostly copy, a stack of reviews, and some photos. It is not a page that designer would draw.

Ethan Evans says the site is run by A/B tests, and the winner is whatever increases sales. The program is called WebLab. Thousands of experiments can run at the same time, and the system can still tell you what one of them did. Nobody cares about the pixels if they sell. Design VPs were hired to make Amazon prettier, and they lost those fights.

For a long time the hidden rule was load time, not layout. Amazon grew up on a slow internet, and the spinner made people leave. A new feature had to be added without adding a millisecond. Speed equals sales. The buy box stayed in the same place so a customer could find the buy button, and what went in it was an offer: a low price, a discount, a delivery date. Mostly, Bezos figured out that a low price drove the business. Evans joined in 2005, so he was there for the 2007 and 2008 recession, when Amazon froze hiring. Because the company had focused on low prices, tighter money pushed more people into online shopping, and Amazon profited.

Transcript

Ex-Amazon VP tells us what it’s really like working with Jeff Bezos ·

My First Million

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Jeff Bezos Only Give Criticism?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos was not mean, but he was demanding, and he almost never said anything good. He would hear an idea and name the three things to fix.
  2. Why Did Jeff Bezos Ship the Fire Phone?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos fell into the flaw of every great man.
  3. Why Did Jeff Bezos Call a Team the B Team?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos once stopped a meeting and asked whether the A team for the project was available, because the people in the room were clearly the…
  4. Why Did Jeff Bezos Trust Anecdotes Over Data?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos kept his Amazon email open to the world.
  5. Why Did Jeff Bezos Send Question Mark Emails?Ethan Evans says a question mark email was how Jeff Bezos scaled customer obsession when he was too busy to investigate every complaint.
  6. What Does Strategically Patient Mean to Jeff Bezos?Ethan Evans says "strategically patient, tactically impatient" was a Jeff Bezos idea. Important things take a long time.
  7. Why Do High Performers Feel Bad at Amazon?Ethan Evans says Amazon talked about the hours in euphemisms. Jeff Bezos's line was that he did not like "work-life balance." He preferred "work-life harmony."
  8. How Much Did Ethan Evans Make at Amazon?Ethan Evans says his target pay in his last year at Amazon was $900,000. The stock usually did better than the target, so he tended to make a low $1 million.
  9. Did Jeff Bezos Want Amazon to Become a Bank?Ethan Evans says Jeff Bezos always declined pitches to turn Amazon into a bank. People kept pitching finance because Bezos came from D. E.
  10. Who Invented Amazon Prime?Ethan Evans says two people claim Amazon Prime. Charlie Ward, then a principal engineer and later a VP, says he invented it.
  11. Who Did Jeff Bezos Quote About the Stock Market?Ethan Evans says the person Jeff Bezos quoted a lot was Benjamin Graham, the investor Warren Buffett also follows.

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