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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."
For the uninitiated, the dash button is an electronic wireless device branded with the logo or namesake of your favourite brand or product. Pushing the button automatically incurs an order for the product and should you be sufficiently removed from the understanding of how this technology works, you'd be inclined to insist its nothing short of magic. It isnt. As a geek, you must understand this technology is a powerful and its opportunities are many. For example:
1. Reprogramming. What if the tide button closed the garage door? opened the trunk? set off the neighbours sprinklers or fired up the coffee maker? Amazon is offering for a discount the opportunity to break out that sweet oscilloscope and crack away at some assembler. Its a discount wireless device that can actuate a solenoid and pour cottage cheese on the cat at the press of a button
2. relocation. Place the device in more suitable areas. What if every time your neighbour sat down on the couch they inadvertantly ordered a 12 pack of bleach? how about whenever the dog bolts through the doggie door your inlaws end up ordering a 24 pack of disposable diapers? The potential is endless and the power is great. you control who gets two crates of macaroni and cheese, how often, and even when.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you don't like the product, don't buy it or use it.
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.
I not only RTFA, I have several dash buttons now. I get immediate feedback through a notification on my phone which lets me know it was ordered and the estimated arrival (as well as giving me the option to go to the app and cancel if it was a accidental order). I get routine updates as it moves through the delivery process - shipping, updated delivery times if it will be late, delivered. It's handy as hell. Take the last paper towel out of the closet and the button is right there, just a press and new paper towels arrive and I don't have to cart them home.
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.
Milk and meat are around the periphery because their display cases are connected to (or close to) the bulk cold storage in the stores. It's part of preserving the "cold chain" of ensuring that products that need constant refrigeration throughout the supply chain actually get constant refrigeration.
Most of the marketing text written about grocery store layouts was developed after the layouts were already in use. Most of the layout quirks are the way they are for more practical and mundane reasons. Layout as a conspiracy makes a great story, but in general, it's just that. Yes, impulse aisles are exceptions as are some other elements in the store, but for the most part, the practicalities of storing and presenting large amounts of food determine the layout.
-Chris
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.
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