In Search of Seamless: Why Amazon Shopping has Ruined Us
Memory Palaces or the method of Loci is a method of memorizing information as if it was stored in an imaginary place where every object in the place can remind the individual of varied information previously learned by them, it provides simple and quick access to knowledge.
Read that? Great! keep that in mind for the rest of the article.
Amazon has proven to be exceedingly successful recently but none of the profits come from amazon shopping they’re mostly derived from from A.W.S. (Amazon Web Services) and ad revenues. This means all of the income generated from amazon shopping can be funneled right back to the company to give constant offers and discounts, single day deliveries… the list goes on. Amazon doesn’t even issue dividends to its shareholders.
The problem
The same style of navigation design with categories to move through the various types of information presented by the creator of the app is the same as it used to be almost a decade ago, just some frills here and there. But the basic pattern of moving through information remains the same. Now we have the ability to curate experiences far beyond what this simple interface can provide but the problem is that in the race to be market leaders, companies only use the old methods of moving through information when new methods can be leveraged to create more efficient experiences.
Mimicry in the market
This behavior of the company has achieved exceptional online shopping experiences worldwide because of the package it provides discounts, deliveries and offers, it definitely provides the customer the best deals a consumer can ask for. But on the flip side, every competitor turns to mimic its interfaces and interactions which the customer is used to and the “industry standard” of interaction design at least in shopping applications and websites remains constant at the same old compartmentalization technique of having sections and menus that reside in one place and help navigate into that has thrived forever. While it is convenient to use the only other interface solution to these are hamburger menus and bottom navs, and that significantly limits the kinds of interactions we can have with our mobile devices.
2D solutions can’t solve 3D Problems
Why make flat interactions when our brains are extremely competent in understanding 3D environments, in fact 2 dimensions aren’t as natural. Which is why Material Design, a slight change from flat interactions was so successful.
Design for humans
We live and breathe in a 3D environment, Experience designers are data architects and are supposed to design natural interfaces that are synchronous with our daily lives. Moving forward into Augmented, Mixed and virtual reality, a leap forward into new form virtual shopping architecture will be created but until the mass adoption of that technology which is at least half a decade from now, we can capitalize on this ability of ours to create new and more efficient interactions with our screens. This ability of using mental maps or memory palaces can be leveraged to benefit users of navigating to various categories of an application or a virtual environment. This principle can be applied to various virtual interactions we have regularly like shopping, productivity, social media etc. This was a natural step forward in mixed reality applications like google street view but several other applications can benefit greatly from newer interactions.
A new way
Imagine you’re on your couch surfing through your favorite clothes store, moving from rack to rack looking through a myriad of choices moving from room to room knowing exactly how to get everywhere like you would in real life.
Wouldn’t this be a fresh take on surface level navigation design? The screen real estate can be of significantly higher value if the user knows every crevice and turn of the virtual space. The ads can be significantly more immersive too.
Thus the memory palaces we create on highly detailed levels in the real world, even if the consumer is able to differentiate between categories and their location, fuzzily they hold promise to significantly improve browsing/ shopping experiences.
Why I dragged Amazon into this
It is the biggest and seemingly most successful e-commerce site with the largest revenue stream and all its competitors worldwide assume that due to its success it must be doing something right. While it is most definitely true that the consumers get insanely lucrative deals from the platform which is attributed to the non payment of dividend and the non profit-making nature of the company which enables it to provide the offers to its users. Thus the whole package of Amazon shopping is what makes for a satisfied consumer and not the interface itself and that can’t be looked from far away and applauded for its success as an interface and categorized as something that “just works” which brings us to the creation of several new experimental interfaces.
I’m not saying I’m right, I’m saying we should try.
Just in case you’re thinking that mainstream sites try to differentiate…
