Amazon is about the last site I'd use as an example of a good UX. They've clearly been working on making it better, as the account drop-down has shrunk, but the amount of items on this screen is such that it really should have its own search to navigate it. A simple thing like buying a new gift card for someone is surprisingly clunky.
As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.
One pet peeve I have is getting to prime video. They own primevideo.com, but it just tells you to watch on Amazon. It's also the first result when you search (on google) for amazon prime video. There's no direct url to get it (afaik).
PrimeVideo.com is the website (in addition to apps on mobile and living room devices like TVs and consoles) where customers outside of the US, UK, Germany, and Japan can watch Prime Video. In the aforementioned four countries, customers can watch Prime Video directly on their amazon.* retail website instead.
I felt the same way with Amazon. Before then it was easy to navigate and finding the product that I want to buy. Now, I couldn't navigate it well like I did in the past. And asian-sounding names products took over first few pages of result which made it difficult to filter out. And they are crap quality products. It is easily to tell which products is made in. Hint the brand name is all capitalized.
Really? Criticizing Google's frontends but praising GitHub and Amazon? If I had to pick a large tech company with a bad frontend Amazon would be top of the list. GitHub is not great either. I guess this kind of thing is just subjective though.
Github's site is really fast. Many of the pages it displays are dense with information and I think it displays everything well, for example viewing diffs in Github is very good, it smartly wraps all the text so you can view everything on the screen and everything loads fast. Try comparing it to Bitbucket's diff view, which can't wrap text amongst other things. It's light years better in comparison. It looks good at any window width with little wasted whitespace.
Amazon's site works pretty well. Their product range is quite a mess to navigate but I've never been annoyed much by their front end. It seems pretty well engineered, eg. [1]
For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example:
* say you're on page A
* navigate to page B
* navigate to page C
* click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B
* the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar
Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.
github is great, both web and mobile (especially mobile). and their new homepage is great too.
target's item pages are really good right now. I love the information density and layout on their site, which to me is suggestive of thoughtful human-oriented design rather than amazon's (highly effective) a/b test shit shoveling.
amazon has "ship-it" UI standards and a lot of variance in page section order (could be a/b testing, or just discrete developer teams).
they have lots of really interesting ideas scattered around for how they can reach customers with unique contextual information, but I have a hard time with how dynamic the layout is and they also don't know how to make good hero pages. too many over-compressed image banners and image tables.
amazon and github both have crappy search which is kind of interesting to me. amazon sort basically doesn't work either, for price or for rating. not sure why.
