Amazon: bad design, great Design
Published in
2 min readJul 21, 2016
Amazon’s first website is 21 years old. Happy birthday amazon!
Its very first web page shows us how far the web has come (congrats nerds!) and just how little Design has changed.
It’s easy to mock the looks — believe me — but for all the faux marble and soviet style inspired background it nailed what actually matters.
Bezos is pretty lame when it comes to design, but a master at Design, i.e. solving a problem; a.k.a know thy customer. Look for yourselves:
This piece of internet history, frugal as it is:
- Explains what the product is: highlighting what’s unique about it while introducing it in familiar terms for the expected audience.
- Creates a sense of scarcity and urgency(buy now!) while reinforcing the fact that offers change daily, incentivising repeat visit, hence retention.
- A minimalistic feature tour.
- Clears up common causes of user anxiety: do I need an account? Can I change my password?
Here we are — two decades later — and I routinely make the same points during design reviews. There’s still lots to learn from this old fart.
Some things don't change. Ever.
