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!

This post could easily have been named “Targeted Blogging” or “Feature requests for Feedburner”

So I started thinking about a RSS/Atom feed that is intelligent. Meaning each of my blog’s feed subscribers can potentially be offered unique content. So let me present a few scenarios:

- Wouldn’t it be great to be able to write a blog entry about music, and have only people who had “music” as one of their interests, be the only ones who see it in their Google Reader/My Yahoo!/NetNewsWire ?
- What if I was organizing an event in San Francisco, and wanted to let only people who are in California know about it ?

Problems:
- Doing Geo Targeting for ads within feeds is easy, since they load within the browser as a separate request, hence the ad server can act with intelligence about time of day/location etc. Sadly the same is not true for my blog entries. I write them once.
- Scenario#2 above is a bit flawed, because what if my friend from NY is going to be in California during that time period, then he/she will not be able to attend, since my blog entry won’t show up in his/her feed!!

Solutions:
- When the user comes and clicks on my “Add to Yahoo/Google” button I ask them for some basic info, such as age/location/profession etc. They may chose to ignore it of course, but if they don’t they are giving me important information.
- A better solution is for feed burning platforms such as Feedburner to maintain a persistent profile of users who are subscribing to feeds. So my profile would read: “Sumit Chachra, Male, 26, San Francisco, CA ……..”. This information will *never* be shared with feed publishers, but they can use it to target content (much the same way Facebook ad targeting works)
- The problem with scenario#2 can be resolved using a few techniques. Assuming Google Calendar has a feature called “Location” where in I can feed in my coordinates for specific dates, and this information can be shared with Feedburner, then my feedburner profile is really “dynamic”! We’re headed down the path of intelligent agents here really, and its all starting to sound like a scifi (scary) movie at this point

All this implies that each subscriber to my feed has a unique feed url, which will spit unique content to each such subscriber, based on certain data points that the feed url platform knows about them, and using which the feed publisher can do targeted content delivery!

I wish this existed!

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!

Previously I wrote about Google Calendar and Gmail improvements, here and here respectively. In this post I gives more product ideas for Google Reader and iGoogle (Seriously why doesn’t Google have a URL like http://igoogle.com or http://igoogle.google.com for it ?? Thats the first thing someone would try the moment they hear Google has launched… err re-branded something to “iGoogle”):

Google Reader

search and auto-filter: Search has been the most asked feature for all GReader users out there. I’d like to see a general blogosphere search (similar to Google Blog Search) built into GReader and a search box specific to the feeds I subscribe too. The auto-filter feature would enable me to save some wildcard searches that would remove matching entries. This would be great since for example I hate reading blog entries about everyone’s del.icio.us bookmarks etc.

- Easy “mark read”: I treat my feed entries in GReader like emails in Gmail. But sadly GReader lacks the archive capability. I’d like to see a easy (one-click) way of marking entries as “don’t read”. These are entries I don’t want to open (since after reading the one line snippet I know that its not worth my time), but don’t want to make the effort of opening them and hence marking them as read. Cause of the sheer slowness of this process (and the fact that I don’t want to mark things as having been read, when its not the case) what ends up happening is that I have a bunch of entries that are unread and clutter my view

- Better auto-sort: I know this feature is sort of in beta, so I’d like to make a few suggestions on how to improve it. So whats wrong with it? The relevance of this feature is for the top 10-20 posts only. Beyond that it starts clustering posts from the same feed in some random cluster size of 4-8 posts. Visually seeing such a pattern, anyone can realize its far from intelligent. I’m sure the GReader team is thinking of using the page rank/starring/subscription/read count of feeds/feed entries etc. to come up with some kind of ranking (apart from posting frequency which I don’t think is the best measure; at least not when its used in isolation). If they can implement the “mark read” feature mentioned above, then they would have an additional measure to use and the read count spurious behavior (I manually mark all del.icio.us entries as “read” to force them to go away) would go away too

- Add to Google: My experience with adding feeds to GReader is less than ideal. For example clicking on the “Add to Google” button on the Official Google Blog leads users to this page. Now the problem with this page is clicking on “Add to Google Reader” actually opens up GReader again (again cause I usually already have it opened). I’d rather make this adding procedure quick and snappy with the ability to add labels etc. and a link to GReader. I usually add new feeds cause my readings on GReader lead me to one, hence the situation where I already have an instance of GReader open.

iGoogle

- Variable width/height for each category: Giving the ability to widen/shrink the width/height of widgets would be great. For example I have 24″ monitors at work and my stock module (which Google calls “stuff”!) has the stock ticker and price/moment etc. too far apart.

- Mobile Version issues: I like the fact that iGoogle has a mobile version. I have 3 issues with it though. One being the fact that I can only add a limited set of modules to my mobile version. Secondly any module I want to add to my mobile version of iGoogle needs to be on my web version too…. for example I don’t want a GReader module on my web version, but on my mobile one!? Lastly I’d prefer not having pagination on the mobile version… or at least not after 3-4 modules only. When I want a quick glance at all my modules, I don’t really want to make an additional click to get to my other modules (mobile interfaces/data speeds are not conducive to excessive user interaction).

I’m a heavy user of Google mail/calendar/notebook etc. This is a part 1 on some of these Google products, and how I think they can offer a better user experience, with what I think are potentially low hanging fruit.

I have a bit more calendar feedback than others, hence devoting an entire post on it. So here goes:

Multiple reminders: be abled to have multiple reminders for each of my calendar events (eg. 1 week, 2 hours). NOTE: Seems this feature got implemented sometime in the last 2 weeks or so… Google can read my mind!
Repeat Whenever: Be able to repeat a event at $n$ future dates. For example festivals happen on different days (Chinese new year etc.) Not all events happen at regular intervals.
Reminders for non-default calendars: Be able to set reminders for events not on default calendar? NOTE: Even this got implemented as of May 3, 2007. Read here.
Events at non-day/time resolution: Putting events at the month/year/week resolution? For example year of the pig, month of excitement, week of joy? I can’t describe these events without making an event that has start and end dates of appropriate length. You can imagine the messy look on my calendar if I describe the year of the pig as a year long event!! This feature would be on the lines of an “All day” event.
Better repeats: I’d like the capability to be able to put events at the level of “last day of month / middle of the month” etc. I know last friday or the month is possible, but I don’t happen to be able to use it (yet). The repeat whenever feature I mention above is slightly different than this one.
Better reminders: Reminders at $n$ days before an event? Currently its maxed out at 1 week?
GTalk integration: How about showing me as busy on GTalk based on my calendar events, if I’ve marked myself as busy on my calendar? Not sure if everyone would want this, hence this could be an optional setting.

Hopefully someone on the Google Calendar is reading this (and my mind!)

UPDATE: How could I forget to request a J2ME app for Google Calendar, similar to Gmail Mobile. Am sure Google is working on this, given the popularity of their current mobile offerings!