Xarg blog Archive

There is an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon.com up at goodexperience.com about usability and customer centered design.

I particularly liked this since it captures what I think is exciting about building things on the web:

For us, it's a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the "similarities" feature - the one that says "people who bought this also bought that." In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That's an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.

She also mentions some of their in jokes like the butterfly ballot joke and the current Customers who wear clothes also shop for: clean underwear bit which shows up promoting clothes purchases in the books section. I had seen the tag line before and wondered if it was intentional or just another microcontent mistake...