The local Washington DC Interaction Design Association (IxDA) chapter recently conducted an IxDA ‘09/IA Summit ‘09 “redux” mini-conference, allowing members of the DC user experience community to hear abridged versions of select presentations from each conference. Jared Spool’s presentation focused on Amazon.com’s smart design decisions and how these decisions have made Amazon a successful business. In his presentation, Jared stressed that just copying Amazon’s design isn’t necessarily a good idea and doing so may have unintended consequences.

When working with clients we are often asked to “make it work like Google”, or “we want to do it like Amazon does”. These requests are understandable, because both Google and Amazon are really good at what they do. Google allows us to find information we are searching for quickly and easily, and Amazon makes buying stuff so easy that instead of going out to the store and buying something, we will wait the couple of days it takes to receive an item in the mail. It makes sense that a client would like to copy the success of either Google or Amazon, but just copying the features and interfaces of other sites is not necessarily a recipe for success. 

Amazon.com sells a lot of stuff. They sell a lot of stuff because they provide an amazing user experience; they have designed a system that facilitates users buying stuff quickly and easily. I buy a good number of items from Amazon.com every year because they have great prices, I can find what I want easily, and I am given a lot of information to make a decision on whether or not to buy a certain item. If fact, there are people who go to Amazon.com first just for the reviews even if they think they might buy the item somewhere else. There is no doubt that Amazon has created an incredibly useful recommendation system. 

Yet, just because this system is effective for Amazon, doesn’t mean you should copy it for your site. In fact this might be an incredibly bad idea. For example, Target.com uses leases Amazon’s platform for their own e-commerce site. Target’s recommendation system works in nearly the exact same fashion as Amazon.com. Yet, if you search for an alarm clock on Target.com, you will get a ton of alarm clocks that are rated very low (or not rated at all). If I were in the market for an alarm clock, I would be wondering why Target sells so many crappy ones. 

In his presentation, Spool examines why this system works so effectively for Amazon but tends to fail for Target. Amazon and Target.com both sold a few million copies of the popular book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Yet, if you look at this book’s Amazon page, there are over 3,000 reviews for the book, where the Target.com book page only has 9 reviews. It is obvious that Amazon users are much more likely to post review than the typical Target user. In fact, if you look at the quality of Amazon reviews vs. Target reviews, the Amazon reviews are also much more useful. Amazon reviews are often well written, detailed, and provide a lot of useful pro and con information about the product. Target reviews are typically shorter and contain less useful information than their Amazon counterparts. The fact that Target gets less review for each item also makes the reviews less useful. People are more likely to write a poor review of a product if they have a bad experience than write good reviews when they have a good experience. Thus, Target.com has a lot of alarm clock that are rated very low as not a lot of people are revved up to write a review of that new alarm clock they just bought. Amazon, on the other hand, typically gets a very large amount of reviews for its products. Since products on Amazon tend to get a large number of reviews, there is more likely to be high quality reviews of the a product on Amazon. A product with only 9 reviews on Target is not going to have the same reliability of information for a user to decide to buy or not buy a product.

So, the next time a client asks “Lets do what Amazon is doing”, remember that successful designs are always successful in a specific context. Copying another company’s successful design will not always bring the same success to your company. As user experience designers, it is our job to design the right system for the correct context. It is likely that your context is very different from Google’s or Amazon’s, so copying what they do is not likely to be successful for your situation. As always, informed design that takes into consideration the unique situation of the company’s business, users and technology will always win out over copying successful designs of others.