Amazon.com Item Page Clutter

Amazon.com is an unholy mess when shopping for anything, including books! Let’s say you’re looking for the first Harry Potter book. The URL is http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Sorcerers-Stone-Book/dp/0590353403/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/002-6815992-5484811?ie=UTF8&qid=1184898138&sr=1-3, which is already bad. But if you want a hard copy, it will take ten pages of paper to print out! TEN PAGES of content for Harry Potter. What’s in those ten pages, you ask? Well, the categories are:

Better Together Customers Who Bought This Also Bought Editorial Reviews Product Details What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This? Help others find this item Tags customers associate with this product 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 Reviews Customer Discussions Product Information from the Amapedia Community Listmania! So You’d Like to… Your Recently Viewed Items Look for Similar Items by Category Look for Similar Items by Subject Feedback Your Recent History

That’s twenty categories. Twenty! Working memory, depending on who you ask, can hold four (Cowan, 2001) to seven (Miller, 1956) items, and attention can only process so much of the visual field at a time (Rensink, O’Regan & Clark, 1997). Yet Amazon decides to give a topic like “Are you the publisher or author?” valuable space just in case J. K. Rowling stops by.

What to do? Well, that’s easy.

• Table of contents at the top of the page to easily jump to specific sections
• Cut down on the categories - which ones do users really need?
• Allow user-selectable categories. Amazon already tracks so much about shopping habits, they should track site preferences.

A simple survey would likely suffice, but so would a task analysis or even an eyetracking study. I’d bet that the eyes would move all around the page but never fixate for very long, meaning that the user was having trouble focusing on one particular piece of information - there’s just too much. Amazon is great for finding an amazing array of books and everything else. Now they should focus on not presenting an overwhelming array of information about products to the user.