Life With the Dash Button: Good Design For Amazon, Bad For Everyone Else

vivaoporto writes: A scathing review published on Fast Company describes Amazon's Dash Button, the "Buy Now" button brought into the physical world as "the latest symptom of Amazon's slowly spreading disease", "an unabashed attempt to disconnect customers from the amount of money we're spending." The author's criticism centers on Amazon's lack of focus on customer experience, a core UI that doesn't make sense, limited and expensive product selection and a store UX "no longer designed for your convenient shopping", but rather "designed for their profitable selling."

Comments

Re:That's all that consumer-oriented businesses do

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Minimum viable product, maximum revenue extraction.

If you don't like the product, don't buy it or use it.

Or did you think the evolution of subscriptions and microtransactions was to benefit you, the customer?

Oddly enough, yes. Successful businesses are motivated by maximizing their profit. But they succeed at this only if people actually choose to buy their products because they benefit. The fact that the business is primarily motivated by its own profits is not a problem, because in a free market, the only way to increase those profits is when people choose to buy their products and actually hand them their money.

It's not zero-sum game, it's a positive sum game: both buyers and sellers benefit, each in their own way.

The solution to every problem isn't an app

[sjbe]

Why not just have a cell phone app.

Because the best solution to every problem isn't an app. Believe it or not there sometimes are better and more efficient ways to solve a problem.

Open the app, see a list of easy to order items, click on the items you want to order and hit send. That's it. Very simple to use, and the user knows that their order went through.

All of which is harder than just pushing a button. You just described a 4 step process than in reality has even more steps. (turn on phone, log in, find app, open app, scroll through list, select item(s), select send). Compare that with pushing a single button on a wall and it is absurdly complicated.

Look I don't have any use for these Dash buttons myself but I understand what they are trying to do. The less steps someone has to go through the more likely they are to buy. The founder of Coke basically built his business around making sure his product was "within arm's reach of desire" which is why you can easily find a coke product almost anywhere on the globe even in some of the most remote corners. They made buying their product VERY easy. Amazon is trying to do similar things. Maybe the Dash buttons won't work out but the principle of what they are doing makes sense. Sometimes a more general solution isn't the better one.

Re:That's all that consumer-oriented businesses do

[ExekielS]

We have studies that show there is no market competition with fewer than 5 choices holding more than 70% of market share. Freedom and choices are a lot more limited than you are imagining, both theoretically and practically. Which is why consumer survey's showed that 85% of consumers preferred low gloss/matte screens but over 95% of screens made were high gloss, a problem that has existed for MUCH too long.