Although the Amazon UI has had a reasonably good overhaul, its been pretty much cosmetic. I like the fact that they have more intuitive dropdowns, a large cart icon and a navigation panel on the left. Sadly the number of clicks I require to accomplish a few tasks and few of the under-performing features leave much to my imagination.

I think Amazon has done an amazing job in terms of site uptime, customer service and on-time delivery/handling of orders. A few changes would go a long way!

So here’s my ramblings on a few:

Search
- Make everything searchable. I mean EVERYTHING! Make all past items (for the last 5 years in my case) I have purchased on Amazon searchable. Its a big big pain trying to find that one thing I had ordered once and I want one more of it or want to gift to my friend. Make it easy and straightforward.

- Make my wish list searchable. How am I supposed to manage/find items in the 200+ items in my wish list (or shopping list or any list for that matter).

- In addition to the above, if I search for a keyword that matches against things I have bought in the past and/or have in my wish/shopping lists then why not show them in small boxes on the sides on the search results page?

- Please make search fast! Always helpful. Since right now I happen to be using Google to search amazon. Looking for that Objective-C book on Amazon. My search is “Amazon objective-c” and off I go! Also, how about auto-complete as soon as I start typing anything. Maybe the name of a book or author or product etc.?

Shopping Cart
- Why does deleting an item require a page refresh (AJAX anyone?)? Moreover why do I have to go one by one on each item to delete them? How about a “delete all” button with a warning popup? I know they all sound like revenue losing propositions, but offer an awesome customer experience. Believe me, if I don’t want to purchase something then a bad delete implementation is not going to make me!

- I as a regular user of Amazon am always shopping or looking for a few things. Gifts, something for the house, books, what have you. I may or not buy them at the same time and hence am forced to use the “save for later feature”. Moreover lets say I am trying to buy a few small things for my parents anniversary. Why can’t I make a separate cart for them which once filled with the items I so desire, can be purchased with 1 click? Basically I should be able to create custom carts on the fly.

Lists
- Although a few changes have been made in lists they are still not manageable. Apart from the fact that I can’t search them, there is no capability to subscribe to or get updated when things get added to my friends wish lists. There is no easy way to share my wish list on my blog (as a widget) or on Facebook etc. If fixed I think lists can be a big winner and revenue driver for Amazon

- If I visit a product which is already in my wish list, instead of informing me of that fact, Amazon keeps showing me the “Add to Wishlist” button. Would be really cool if Amazon fixed that and went a few steps ahead. How about knowing who my friends are (social network here we come!!) and showing me which of my friends have that item on their public lists.

Account/Orders
- Usually when I’ve placed a few orders on Amazon and they have been shipped I sometimes come to Amazon to track those orders. This tracking requires me to make 3 clicks before I even land on the page where my orders are:

Account (click) -> Recent Orders:Go (click) -> Username/password (click)

Why can’t there be an easier way to track orders? Moreover the estimates for delivery and shipping that Amazon gives (at least to non-Amazon Prime members) are way off most of the times. How about send me an email (or SMS) when the product gets delivered? UPS/DHL provide that state in their API’s, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to implement. To improve the above 3-click process I can propose:

Account_Dropdown:Recent Orders (click) -> Username/password (click)

OR

If I’ve logged in within the last 30 minutes then just skip the Username/password step and reduce the entire process to 1-click!

So I know personalized search is hot and all. But how long do I have to be using the search (logged in as a user) for that engine to start personalizing results ?

Recently (last week or so) I noticed that search for TIVO on Google stopped returning their stock graph etc. at the top. It returned the TIVO website instead as the top link, with an additional “Stock quote for TIVO” below it.

Now I’ve clicked that a few times, forced myself to search for “TIVO stock” instead to get what I want; but still Google hasn’t learnt that when I am searching for TIVO I am really looking for the stock ticker. What they have learnt of course is that “most” people when searching for TIVO (rightfully so) don’t want to know about its stock. How is that personalization? Thats just the law of averages being forced on me.

Please fix this, and the fact that the SERP shouldn’t keep changing on a weekly basis. Thanks!

It was a long time coming! Yahoo! chose to use Flash (Flex?) to build the online version of messenger. Will I use it, probably on my personal laptop at home (one less piece of desktop software to install… phew!). Does it even come close to the Gtalk that comes integrated with Gmail (launched more than a year back)? Not for me, but I can imagine people who would want all the bells and whistles of their regular desktop messenger (fonts, text size, bold/italic etc.) to like the new Yahoo! Web Messenger. Some of my comments on this new products and ways to improve it:

History: So finally I can see my chat history. But why not give a search box right at the top instead of making me click on a link? Pretty basic interaction designer stuff I assume? Instead a web search box is provided at the top.

Cntrl-W / Cntrl-G / Cntrl-Tab: None of these nice shortcuts works. Cntrl-W should close my current chat tab, Cntrl-G should let me buzz my friends (my friends can buzz me, but my window doesn’t vibrate!) and Cntrl-Tab should let me move between chat tabs, just like I can on my Firefox (or at least Tab like the way it does in the Gmail/Gtalk)

Copying multiple lines: Doesn’t work. Only one line at a time. Thats pretty lame.

Banner ad on the right: Was it very essential to put that ugly banner ad on the right, specially when a new product like this launches? If I were the Product Manager on the web messenger team, I’d instead match (and rotate every 10 minutes or less) text ads related to my past/current chats. I’d bet this would increase CTR significantly. Irrespective its worth an experiment for sure. Simple bucket test to conduct.

Login popup: Why does a new popup window need to be opened to make my login? Its a very jarred user experience, different from every other Yahoo! property I’ve used before.

Gmail has been down for me for the last couple of hours, out here in India. Anyone else facing this downtime too? I’m getting the following message:

Temporary Error (502)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

I wouldn’t really call more than 2 hours “temporary”. Someone missed their SLA targets!

UPDATE 1: Its weird, I get the following error now (choosing the HTML view does open up my inbox… its broken though since I have no vertical scrollbars?!?):

Loading…

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information.

UPDATE 2: Its finally up after a 4-5 hour outage!

UPDATE 3: Its been 5 days since I wrote this post. But as can be seen from the comments below (and the traffic I am getting to this post), people are still facing this issue with their gmail accounts (I am not). This seems to be a user specific access issue, rather than a mass outage. It might be that gmail is performing some system/software upgrades. Being patient is the only way out! I did not lose any of my emails/data, so don’t see a need to be concerned as of now.

As this blog entry proves, engineers at google do look out for issues users may (or may not) be facing with google products. So here is my latest gripe with Google Calendar. I keep getting this error:

“One or more of your selected calendars could not be loaded at this time. You can try to re-select the hidden calendars in a few moments.”

This usually happens for public calendars that I am subscribed to. If I manually select them, they come right back. But after a while unclick and disappear automatically. Anyone has any idea whats going on?