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Jesse James Garrett on User Experience and how eBay and Amazon have gone astray. I think this part of the interview is great…

Do you agree with the top international sites respondents chose for their usability – including Amazon, Google and eBay?

It’s interesting to see Amazon and eBay so high on the list, because I think Amazon was delivering a really terrific experience a few years ago, but have found themselves in a land of diminishing returns in the design choices they are making.

If you compare the sheer number of navigational elements on a present day Amazon page with the way it was just a few years ago, they are just starting to load these pages up with features. I think the reason they are doing that is that they are trying to squeeze every drop of revenue they can out of these pages, but I think the overall usability is starting to suffer. It’s becoming so baroque - all of the different features and components they have loaded onto these pages.

eBay has almost the opposite problem, in that because they have this enormous community of people, the sellers, that depend on eBay for their livelihood, there are a lot of people that have really invested in how the site functions. eBay has been slow to change, because they haven’t been able to make changes that would appease this audience of millions of people that don’t want to see the site change.

Amazon and eBay are two interesting case studies in how a usable site can go astray.

Read the full article here