COMPANY  //  Amazon

PRODUCT/SERVICE  //  Amazon.com website with Prime

Amazon has been the perennial leader in online e-commerce for decades, but competitors like Walmart and Alibaba are catching up, and now they’re now facing a new breed of competition from Shopify and Instacart that provide a distributed and personalized e-commerce experiences to thousands of small retailers. Even with this dominate position, the Amazon.com shopping experience is still one of the worst designed experiences on the Internet.

DSRUPTR REVIEW  //

Problem Statement

I’ve been an Amazon Prime member for 15+ years and have become increasingly frustrated with the shopping experience because it has gradually gotten worse over time, where it’s difficult to navigate, presents too many choices, is impossible to get help on simple tasks, and lacks any intelligence or personalization. The challenge is that design and technology have evolved extensively in the last 20 years and other competitors are providing better web experiences that actually meet my needs while solving the main problems that I have with Amazon.

 

Approach

To create a more objective approach to this redesign project, I utilized a Human-Centered Design approach because it optimizes the usability and value of a digital product by focusing on the users’ goals and needs, and by applying human factors, and usability knowledge & techniques. And this approach perfectly aligns to Amazon’s vision of being the “Earth’s most customer-centric company” by making the customers first – and engaging with them directly – throughout the process. 

More specifically, I utilized the Double Diamond design process because it’s structured, incremental, and thoughtful, where it helps people/teams to understand – rather than simply assume – what the problem is, and then to take time to build off of what you learn about how these problems impact the customers (or end users). And, this process is easily understood for designers and non-designers alike.

 

Design Strategy/Brief

I start my design strategy by researching the Amazon company website to get a better understanding of their vision, goals, and culture.

Amazon’s corporate vision statement: 

“We want to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

 

Amazon’s main 3 business goals that this design strategy will support:

• Increase loyalty with casual shoppers
• Provide the best products at the lowest prices
• Make it easier and faster for customers to find and buy any product online

To better frame Amazon’s vision and goals, I created the value proposition for their Amazon.com site and Prime service.

 

Amazon.com value proposition: 

Amazon Prime is a service where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy or experience online at Amazon.com – with a focus on low prices, large selection, and convenience.

 

Customer Research

Typically I utilize a lot of user research methods, but for the sake of time I’m going to utilize my own experience – and those of my friends & family – to define the problems and challenges with Amazon.com Prime experience.

The Amazon.com website – via Prime service – is something I use frequently to not only purchase household items, electronics, and food, but also to watch videos and listen to music. Over the years I have learned to use Amazon.com for a variety of uses, however, there’s a large confluence of problems on the site that hinder my experience:

• Overwhelmed by the massive amount of choices in search results and landing pages
• Difficult to browse the site because many of the links aren’t relevant or useful
• Dark patterns (e.g. fake reviews, fake ratings, etc.) can inadvertently force users into purchasing items that they don’t want/need
• Lack of insight around monthly/yearly purchase totals that help manage budget/savings
• Little help or support in completing basic tasks and goals
• Site aesthetic is outdated and unappealing compared to competitor sites

 

These challenges have led to a growing number of unmet customer needs:

• Find higher quality items faster so they don’t go to competitor sites
• View fewer – higher quality – choices when searching for products in order to make browsing faster and purchase decisions easier
• Utilize insight from family & friends in order to inform better purchasing decisions
• Notified about product updates & availability, orders & purchases, pickup availability, and friend recommendations because these will help make better real-time decisions
• Shop in a more personalized experience that mimics their persona

Bottom line: the Amazon.com site and Prime service are waaaay past their prime (pun intended)… like the fanny pack and Mom jeans. I suppose when you’re making $386 billion a year, you tend to want to do nothing to ensure you don’t break your cash cow.

Defining Our Personas

Next, I created a few personas that list out specific customer motivations, needs, tasks, tools, and frustrations with their current Amazon.com shopping experiences. And then I prioritize them for this exercise (primary, secondary, tertiary).

Opportunity Areas

In reviewing all of my research about myself and friends & family, these were the main opportunity areas I wanted to explore further that will help to potentially alleviate the problems and challenges of our primary persona, Ryan Researcher.

In addition to the opportunity areas, I also added “How might we..” phrases to each opportunity to help frame the design challenges. This helps to keep the design solutions focused on solving the specific problem we first outlined while preventing individuals from suggesting their random pet solutions.

 

PART 1 RECAP //

Thanks for joining me for Part 1 where I provided an overview of Design the right thing from the Double Diamond approach for redesigning the Amazon.com web experience.

I kicked things off by defining an initial problem statement and initiated the research discovery phase that enabled us to get acquainted with Amazon.com customers (like me) as thoroughly as possible. This is a divergent zone, where we gather as much data as possible, and embrace the complexity of the problem. Listening to the user’s insights and stories and documenting the data becomes the key activity.

Once we have gathered all this valuable research, we defined our data in the convergent zone, where we use many tools to aggregate and validate research data. Themes, patterns, and trends emerge through affinity mapping and persona definition, which can lead to a necessary revised problem statement. Such revision of the initial problem statement is extremely important, as it sets us up for the phase 2 design stretch.

Continue on to Part 2…

Click here to continue reading Part 2, where I’ll continue discussing and exploring the design phase of reimagining the Amazon.com web experience utilizing Prime.