Can too much information make a site visitor click off? One online giant apparently doesn’t think so.
Used to be, Amazon was the best place in the world to size up a book quickly. You’d see the book, one or two editorial reviews, and any number of enormously helpful customer reviews.
Pull up an Amazon book page today, and you’re confronted with so much useful information, it becomes almost overwhelming. Check out the screen grab below. Before you reach Customer Reviews, you work your way through …
- Basic book info and pricing
- Search Inside
- Special Offers and Product Promotions
- Better Together
- Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Editorial Reviews
- Product Details
- Inside This Book (long list of tags)
- Books on Related Topics
- Customers viewing this pages may be interested in these Sponsored Links
- What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?
- Looking for “wikinomics” products
- Tags Customers associate with this product
- Are you the publisher or author?
- Rate this item
And now finally, Customer Reviews. But wait! More to come – ten additional categories of information. A person could spend four hours on this page and not absorb all the available data. Sure, this superfluity of information has its advantages, but do site visitors reach a point where they think -
I don’t have time for all this, so I’ll skip it altogether.
Can too much be worse than not enough? Look below and decide for yourself!
Interesting – I suppose the theory is that if you’re interested you’ll keep exploring, but if you want to make a quick decision you can still see ‘enough’ from the top of the page, without scrolling down to the bottom? (And it’s a long way down!)
Joanna
I’m no web site designer, but I have two criterion by which I judge the effectiveness of the design of a web site:
(1) Can I first time visitor find exactly what he wants within five minutes?
(2) Can members or regular visitors find what they want within two minutes?
If the answer to either question is no, then I believe that the web site has not been well designed – period.
In relation to a site a site offering a huge range of features like Amazon, keeping the site simple and easy to use would be very challenging.
But that’s no excuse. In my opinion, well designed web site are simple and easy to navigate around, regardless of how dynamic the site offering is.
Cheers
Hi Andrew, your benchmarks make a lot of sense. It’ll be interesting to see how Amazon customers respond.
Yeah, I guess you are right there Brad.
I haven’t personally visited Amazon myself for about five years.
I suppose most people visiting Amazon would not expect to spend a fair while on the site, given it’s huge range of features. No doubt some visitors to Amazon will want to spend a considerable amount of time exploring what the site offers.
However, I still believe they should cater for the user who does not wish to spend a great deal of time on the site as well as those who wish to explore. In the example you show above, I don’t think they have done this.
Cheers
Andrew