Don't Fix Problems by Documenting Them

There's an old saw that says there's no such thing as a bug -- only obscure features.* Apparently, Yahoo! has taken this to heart. I have a Yahoo! email account I use, like, never. Sorry, Yahoo! (and my DoS** just asked me why I'm apologizing to an Internet service.)

In any event, in order to test an email configuration change, I needed to send an email from an account other than my own and other than GMail. So I logged into my Yahoo! email account and I accidentally agreed to upgrade to the new UI, whereupon I was presented with this alert:


I'll ignore the unnecessary cuteness of the figure on the left because there's a bigger faux pas. There's no way out! Surely, Yahoo! must really think it's important for me to see whatever it is they want to tell me. And what is it?


The thing labeled "Contacts" is my Address Book. Well, duh. That's what almost every other program calls it. If it's wrong, why don't they call it Address Book? Maybe they could use a larger icon that's a little more visible and a little clearer than a rolodex card ("what's a rolodex card?" says my daughter).


Use the thing labeled Options to set your Options. Gee, thanks! Is there a problem with discoverability? Maybe they should make it more obvious.


Use Check Mail to check your mail. Wow! Don't forget to tell me to use the pull down menu even though I don't have a pull down menu (because I only have one account).


To get help, use Help. Yeah, it's a tiny blue button. If people are having problems finding the help, give it a big icon. And, maybe, if it's a big issue, your software isn't quite as easy to use as you want it to be.

Fix the problems, don't document them. And even my daughter thinks the illustrations are just annoying.


*One of the first debuggers I used was actually named after this fact -- BOFF, the B Obscure Feature Finder was the B language debugger on Honeywell mainframes.

**DoS, apparently, means Daughter over Shoulder. PoS is much more common webspeak. And here I thought it meant Denial of Service.

A Few Hundred Options

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so let's start there:

Unfortunately, this is just a part of the picture. There's more, lots more. Beyond what you see here, there are another 40 or so items that are available. Altogether, you can get to a few hundred possible options in two mouse clicks or less. You’ll commonly see a statistic like that touted to indicate that an interface is good.

But, it's not a good thing -- it's overwhelming. As a user, I don't know why I'm here. The things that are shown are all over the map -- ranging from configuration to content editing to status information that's not actionable -- and there is little to help the user get oriented, figure out how the system works, or accomplish the tasks that they want to get done. Although the options are organized into sections, the sections aren't parallel, which makes them less useful. The result is that it's a Winchester Mystery House of an interface.

I could analyze this interface to death, pick apart every piece of it and tell you every single little nitpicking thing that's wrong with it.

But I'm not going to.

So why am I showing this random interface to you? Well, in November, this interface became my problem. It's the old interface of Sampa, a web site creation service, and I joined Sampa to tackle it. So what did we do with the interface?

We tossed it.

And that's the real reason that I'm not going to nitpick the old interface. It's history. I wouldn't have joined Sampa if there hadn't been a clear commitment to make big changes, whatever they were. Paul and Marcelo (CEO and CTO, respectively) signed up. At the beginning, I'm not sure they really knew just how big those changes might be.

Even before I started, I had reached the conclusion that the interface was unfixable, but Paul and Marcelo hadn't. Just today, Paul reminded me that he had thought that I could just fix the old interface. This meant I really had to make the case for a new interface.

To cut to the end of the story, we launched a completely new Sampa today.

If you're lucky enough to be presented with a problem like this, I highly recommend looking at the big picture. You can't take an unplanned explosion and overlay it with a solid foundation. In the long run, you'll regret all the time you spend on bandaids. It's a big commitment (and you might have to make the case), but you need to build a new foundation and provide yourself room to grow. Next, I’ll write more about how I made the case and, after that, I'll discuss Sampa's new UI foundation.

I just wish I could solve the clutter in my garage as easily.

Update: Follow-up article: Making the Redesign Case
Press release about launch: PDF

The Epiphenomenon of Amazon

Every single thing on every Amazon page is valuable. They've proved it with empirical testing. Everything you see increases their sales.

Every single thing on Amazon is clutter. Over the years, Amazon pages have gotten more and more cluttered, making Amazon harder and harder to use and hurting their sales.

Which is it?

Amazon has an amazing testing system. It's really quite clever. Whenever they want to add a new feature, or they're trying to figure out which of two different ways of doing something are better, they run an A/B test. The A/B test splits their users in half, at random, and gives each half a different experience. It doesn't take a lot of users run through the system to see whether the A group or the B group has more success in finding things and (this is what they really care about) spends more money. They take the feature whose users spent more money and -- voila! -- they've increased their sales. Repeat this over and over again and you've got a clear recipe for success.

Or do you?

There's no denying that Amazon is a very successful company and I'm not going to say otherwise. I'm an Amazon Prime member myself. But how much more successful could they be?

They're certainly trying hard. On the Amazon home page I see:

• Shopping departments
• Check This Out
• Features & Services
• A9 Web Search
• Roy's Amazon.com
• Today's Deals
• Gifts & Wish Lists
• Gift Cards
• Search Amazon.com
• Your Account
• Your Cart
• Your Lists
• Introducing Kindle
• What Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
• More to Explore
• New For You
• Customers with Similar Searches Purchased
• Get Yourself a Little Something
• Capture Picture-Perfect Memories
• SCRABBLE Crosswords
• Amazon Daily Blog
• Treat Yourself
• Amazon Unbox
• Add to Your Collection
• Check Out This New Release
• Top Sellers in Video Games
• Save with the Amazon.com Visa card
• (an ad for Personalized m&m's)
• Shop These Stores at Amazon.com
• Where's My Stuff?
• Shipping & Returns
• Need Help?

I'm leaving some trivial stuff out, but, hopefully, you get the gist. I just refreshed and I see a lot of different things:

• Shopping departments
• Check This Out
• Features & Services
• A9 Web Search
• Roy's Amazon.com
• Today's Deals
• Gifts & Wish Lists
• Gift Cards
• Search Amazon.com
• Your Account
• Your Cart
• Your Lists
• Introducing Kindle
• Smooth New 120Hz 1080p LCD HDTVs
• Whodunnit?! Browse Bestsellers in Mystery
• Browse Bestselling Books in History
• Buy Three Place Settings, Get a Fourth Free
• Customer Favorites in Nonfiction Books
• Cross Party Lines with Bestselling Political Books
• Learn About the Networked Home
• Amazon Daily Blog
• Treat Yourself
• Amazon MP3
• This Year File with Ease
• RailsSpace: Building a Social...
• Bestsellers in Magazines: Parenting & Family
• Save with the Amazon.com Visa card
• (an ad for Personalized m&m's)
• Shop These Stores at Amazon.com
• Where's My Stuff?
• Shipping & Returns
• Need Help?

Wow! That is a lot of stuff. We could repeat that forever and I don't even know how many different things will turn up. Let's look at an item page for a well-known book:

• The book info & pricing, links to Used & New copies, etc.
• Special Offers and Product Promotions
• Better Together
• Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
• Editorial Reviews
• Product Details
• Look Inside This Book
• Customers viewing this page may be interested in these Sponsored Links
• What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
• Looking for "book name here" products?
• Tags Customers Associate with Similar Products
• Are you the publisher or author? Learn how Amazon can help you make this book an eBook.
• Rate This Item to Improve Your Recommendations
• Customer Discussions
• Product Information from the Amapedia Community
• Listmania!
• So You'd Like To...
• Look for Similar Items by Category
• Look for Similar Items by Subject
• Harry Potter Store
• Never Misplace Your Readers Again
• Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free
• Editors' Faves in Books
• Another ad for personalized m&m's
• Feedback
• Where's my Stuff
• Shipping & Returns
• Need Help
• Your Recent History
• plus lots of other stuff at the top, bottom, and right

The one I find the most interesting is "Are you the publisher or author? Learn how Amazon can help you make this book an eBook." Of all the millions of people who visit pages on Amazon, the vast majority of them, something like 99.99999% of them, are not the publisher or author of the item on the page they're visiting. Yet I've had Amazon show me this section on books by well-known authors, as well as on things that can't possibly be made into eBooks (this one, for example).

If I'm not the author, I can provide feedback in lots of ways. I can review it, discuss it, or write about it on Amapedia (what's the difference between those options?). I can also tag it or rate it. Or, I can create a Listmania! list or a Guide that comments on it (what's the difference between those two anyway?) and Amazon helpfully shows me links to other people who have done just that. Gee, only seven ways to provide feedback.

The vast quantity of information presented to me by Amazon is truly daunting. Not only am I inundated with information but, if I see something interesting, I may not even be able to find it again because it all changes dynamically. While Amazon's A/B test results may well be completely correct for each of the individual features, users do not use the site as a set of individual features. They see everything all at once. They see the clutter of all of the pieces.

I realize that Amazon's not hurting for sales right now. But how much better could they do if they took a holistic approach to their entire user interface? Is there anybody or any group at Amazon who is responsible for the entire customer experience?