Comment by throwayyy479087

It's ugly and clunky because a) Jeff used to guard it fiercely, b) because a/b testing is not guaranteed to get the best results, and c) you might just be on the "ugly" a/b test.

They could make the UI better if they wanted to, but they don't, because of reliability.

For most enterprises, if it works, don't touch it.

> Amazon.com is likely the most a/b tested piece of software on the planet. It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_ - same with Alibaba and Yahoo JP.

This was on the HN frontpage yesterday: "Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651763

I’ve seen countless bad decisions being taken because the A/B test was badly done. You can’t assume that some decision was good JUST because they A/B-tested it.

"It is ugly and clunky because that's what _works_"

It's a legacy code nightmare, but customers are used to it and this is #1 reason why it will not be changed anytime soon.

Amazon ios app is pretty trash. I keep getting blank white screens, it has been this way for months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/tto68z/anyone_else_get...

That is not true, some parts might be clunky because that works, but there's also many parts that are clunky simply because it's hard to make a change without breaking anything. But amazon doesn't care due to their strong position in the market and because AWS is their cash-cow anyways.

i read somewhere that bezos personally controls the look and feel of amazon and thats why it looks like that. some amazon UX/UI director even quit over it

its not what works, its whats good enough, or not bad enough to cause an obvious problem. well maybe thats what you mean by "works" i dunno