超越设计：亚马逊成功背后的购物体验逻辑【UXRen译#220】

由宝珠 · 发布日期 2018-03-27 · 已更新 2019-04-09

作者： jason brush | 翻译：悲回风审校：林有九

亚马逊无疑是商业在数字化转型中最重要的一股力量。据估计，在所有在线销售中，44%的交易额是在亚马逊上完成的，还有超过三分之一的美国人是亚马逊Prime会员。该公司去年的收入为56亿美元（颇有争议的是，政府连这笔钱的一个子儿都没见到），而且当前95%的Prime会员说他们“一定”或“可能”再次续订。然而，几乎没有人将公司的成功归结于“设计”。如果你查看过颇为知名的亚马逊领导力原则，只有 “客户至上”和“创造和简化”两条原则与设计师式的产品和服务开发方法相关，他们甚至不谈论设计。

Amazon is undoubtedly the most significant force in the digital transformation of commerce: an estimated 44% of all online sales are on Amazon, and more than one in three U.S. adults are estimated to be Amazon Prime members. The company had $5.6 billion in income last year (none of which went to the federal government, controversially), and 95% of current Prime subscribers say they’ll either “definitely” or “probably” renew. Yet few credit the role design has played in the company’s success. If you read Amazon’s famous leadership principles, only two-“Customer Obsession” and “Invent and Simplify”—are correlated with a designerly way of developing products and services And they don’t even explicitly talk about design.

从美学角度来看，我们期望优秀的设计是简洁和美观的，但亚马逊的网店设计和这两点都不沾边。相反，它侧重于体验的简单性、过程和功能。亚马逊对复杂视觉效果的成功尝试，让许多设计师颇感困惑。那么，设计师应如何看待并理解亚马逊为什么可以不靠美观度仍然取得设计上的成功？我认为它使用了绝佳的购物体验中所体现的四个关键原则，不管是数字的、实体的、奢侈品的或低成本的，在他们的心中，优异的购物体验应该包括：

From an aesthetic point of view, Amazon’s web store is neither simple nor beautiful–two things we expect of good design. Instead, it focuses on simplicity of experience, process, and functionality. For many designers, the idea that an experience with Amazon’s visual complexity succeeds is somewhat confounding. So, how might a designer look at Amazon to understand why it works, despite—if not because of—its aesthetic?Amazon’s design succeeds because it makes use of four key principles that all great shopping experiences embody—whether digital or physical, luxury, or low-cost. At their heart, all great shopping experiences are:

1、透明：优异的购物体验使得定价和购买过程清楚且简单易懂。

Transparent：Great shopping experiences make pricing and the purchase process clear and easily understood.

乍一看，亚马逊的使用体验并不特别透明。考虑到动态定价模式（类似于令人讨厌的Uber峰时溢价，或是机票和酒店的动态定价，这种模式总是困扰用户或游客），亚马逊也因此被罚款处罚，就是因为其缺乏透明度。虽然消费者不喜欢动态定价，但是他们也会货比三家，确保自己买的最划算；因为动态价格并不是亚马逊独有的。

At first glance, the Amazon experience doesn’t appear to be especially transparent. Consider its dynamic pricing model: Similar to Uber’s loathed surge pricing or the familiar dynamic pricing of airfares and hotels that bedevils travelers, Amazon has been rightly criticized for a lack of transparency, leading to fines. While consumers don’t care for[Phi6] dynamic pricing, they are also accustomed to doing their own research to make sure they’re getting the best price; dynamic shopping is not unique to Amazon.

那么，为什么用户会“放过”亚马逊的动态定价呢？一个可能的原因是亚马逊凭借其Prime服务解决了在线购物的两个主要障碍：消除了“隐藏的运输成本”和“网上购物比零售店购物慢”的感知。Prime的成功源于其易理解的心智模型的设计：支付一次年费，可以享受包邮和两天到货（另外可以免费观看奥斯卡大片）。Prime的心智模型的透明性，成就了亚马逊最著名的购物交互设计成果：简洁优雅的“一键购物”专利（最近到期了），为在Alexa上用语音购物以及亚马逊的Dash按钮交互设计奠定了基础。

So why might users give Amazon a pass on its dynamic pricing? One possible reason is that Amazon has, with its Prime service, solved two key obstacles of online shopping: eliminating both the hidden cost of shipping and the perception that shopping online is slower than shopping at retail. Prime succeeds because of the design of its effortless mental model: pay a yearly fee and get free two-day shipping (with Oscar-worthy movies included!). The transparency of Prime’s mental model is what enables Amazon’s most notable interaction design achievements for shopping: the simplicity and elegance of Amazon’s patent (recently expired) for one-click purchases, which laid the groundwork for shopping by voice on Alexa as well as the interaction design of Amazon’s Dash buttons.

2、清晰明确：当人们在不同的产品或产品的变化之间做出选择时，优异的购物体验使这些产品的选择变得清晰明确和直接，这样人们就可以做出自信的、有根据的选择。

Tangible：When people have a choice between different products, or variations of a product, great shopping experiences make those product choices tangible and immediate, so that people can make confident, informed[Phi9] choices.

亚马逊的产品展示页面旨在让用户印象深刻：帮助人们了解任何类型产品的特定属性。如果你去一个只销售单一类型产品的电商网站：卖服装、鞋子或汽车零件的，适应他们的购物体验，成本非常昂贵。

Amazon’s product display page aims to achieve the remarkable: helping people understand the attributes of any type of product for sale. If you go to a commerce website that only sells a single type of product—clothing, or shoes, or automotive parts—it has the luxury of tailoring its experience to the particular attributes of the products it sells.

相比之下，亚马逊期望销售几乎所有可以想象到的商品。这意味着产品展示页面和结果列表是流畅的、简洁的、且不必为特定类别或品牌站点做任何定制化处理。亚马逊把这个表面上的劣势变成了一种有利条件：每个产品展示页面都使用相同的模块和底层结构。这样产生的体验具有一致性，能让用户很容易快速了解任何产品的特定属性。

In contrast, Amazon is designed to sell nearly every product imaginable. This means product display pages and result listings are not as streamlined, elegant, nor necessarily as fit for purpose as a category-specific or brand site. Amazon turns this seeming disadvantage into an asset: Every product display page uses the same modules and underlying structure. This creates a consistency of experience that makes it easy for users to quickly understand the attributes of any product.

3、值得信赖：人们想知道他们光顾的店家是开诚布公的。

Trustworthy： People want to know the store they’re doing business with is up front.

作为一家需要管理自营商品和第三方卖家（亚马逊的“市场”约占其销量售的一半），承诺保持购物体验一致性的亚马逊遭遇了巨大挑战。

As a storefront that manages not only first-party sales (i.e., things Amazon sells itself) but also third-party sales (Amazon’s “Marketplace” comprises roughly half of its sales), Amazon has a remarkable challenge in designing a consistent experience that delivers on its promises.

当单个可购买商品的搜索结果来自多个卖家的时候（这种情况并不少见），亚马逊的购物体验总是令人沮丧：哪个卖家是最可靠的？哪个包邮，哪个不包？哪个用户评价显示最可靠？有时要做很多工作来整理所有的选项，才能做出合理的选择。

One thing that’s especially frustrating with Amazon’s shopping experience is when a search produces results of an item available from multiple sellers (not uncommon): Which seller is most reliable? Which includes shipping, which doesn’t? Which is rated by users as being reliable? It sometimes takes a lot of work to sort through all the options to make a confident choice.

这儿，有一种令人信服的逻辑在起作用：亚马逊不遗余力地避免给这些供应商提供明显的带有他们独特风格的店面设计，这与Etsy和eBay不同，后者帮助供应商创建独特的店面。在亚马逊网站，用户认为自己一直在购买亚马逊自营商品，第三方卖家只能被视为劳务众包平台工人（AMT），负责采购和交付那些亚马逊自家暂时还没仓库的商品。就像Uber和Lyft的司机可能被视为在公司等待自动驾驶汽车达到一个可持续发展的、可行的规模之前的过渡劳动力。

There’s a compelling logic at play: Amazon has assiduously avoided giving those vendors clear storefronts of their own—unlike Etsy and eBay, which help vendors create unique storefronts. In Amazon, the user is always just shopping on Amazon; the Marketplace vendors might only be seen as Mechanical Turk workers for the procurement and delivery of goods that Amazon does not (yet) itself have a corner on, much like Uber and Lyft drivers might be seen as a transitional labor force, while those companies wait for self-driving cars to be available at a sustainable, feasible scale.

亚马逊认为，由联营（第三方卖家）与自营提供的产品相互交织而给用户带来的潜在混乱和额外负担，反而会在其他方面达成一致性的体验，用户很可能面临更大的挑战：送货和退货。

Amazon bets that the potential confusion and additional burden placed on users presented by Marketplace goods intermingling with first-party offers will enable a consistent experience in other areas where user challenges present a much greater risk: delivery and returns.

当你在亚马逊买东西的时候，无论是自营还是第三方，你始终都觉得是从亚马逊购买的，这是因为亚马逊将Prime的两天到货扩展到第三方，并统一退货流程，与用户建立基本的信任不论他们在亚马逊买了什么。在亚马逊平台，第三方卖家很难控制体验。（假如亚马逊仅仅作为平台，敦促第三方卖家通过加大控制来组织和管理购物体验，那么这里的一致性就很难实现）。

When you buy something through Amazon, whether directly or through the Marketplace, you still feel like you’ve bought it from Amazon—this entitles Amazon to extend the Prime’s two-day shipping to third parties, as well as unify the returns process, both of which aim to build fundamental trust with the user around whatever they buy on Amazon. Were Amazon a platform that enabled third-party sellers to curate the experience with more control, this would be harder to achieve.

4、有帮助的：人们并不总是知道自己想要什么，也不总是知道如何得到他们需要的东西。优异的购物体验可以预见到他们的需求，并有前瞻性地回答人们的问题。

Helpful： People don’t always know what they want, or how to get what they need. Great shopping experiences anticipate their challenges and proactively answer people’s questions.

正如商品详情页面能够容纳商品信息的多样性一样，亚马逊的分类搜索界面——左栏过滤器和类别导航——分成很多等级类别，可以无缝地适应当前情境下的选择，这样你就能快速找到你想要的东西。

Just as the product detail page is able to accommodate a diversity of product information, Amazon’s faceted search interface—the left column of filters and category navigation—scales and seamlessly adapts to give users contextual choices, so you can find just what you’re looking for.

就像产品展示页面一样，分类搜索在某些情况下不能完全满足特定类别的需求。以买鞋为例，将亚马逊搜索工具与Zappos（亚马逊旗下）特定的导航对比就知道二者的差异了。为了弥补这些不足，亚马逊使用户能够通过系统快速找到他们正在搜索的内容，而不需要学习新的交互模式，故而产生一致性的体验。

Like the product display page, the faceted search experience suffers in certain instances by not being perfectly tailored to category-specific needs. For instance, compare the tools provided by Amazon to search for shoes compared with (Amazon-owned) Zappos’s shoe-specific navigation. It compensates for these shortcomings with a consistency of experience that enables users to move quickly through the system to find what they’re searching for without needing to learn new interaction patterns.

正如Dieter Rams所说，好的设计使产品有用。

As Dieter Rams Said, Good Design Makes A Product Useful

亚马逊的视觉设计可能不是流畅的、最简约，美观的，或是共情的，但它却非常有用。它的功能和相应的美学是专门定制的，以支持高效购物体验的核心目标。事实上，亚马逊几乎可以说是一种数字化的野兽派：它既简单又高效，以近乎理想化的目的使用最不挑剔的方法满足人们的需要。

Amazon’s visual design might not be streamlined, minimal, beautiful, or engage people on an emotional level, but it is immensely useful. Its functionality and corresponding aesthetic are tailored expressly to support the core attributes of an efficient shopping experience. Indeed, Amazon could almost be described as a sort digital Brutalism: it is straightforward and efficient, with a near-utopian aspiration to meet people’s needs in the least fussy way possible.

亚马逊的成功突显了一个在设计界有时难以接受的原则：成功的设计不一定是美丽的。当然，随着研究主导的设计思维作为广泛采用的设计实践逐渐成为经典标准，设计仅仅是一种审美活动的观念早已被推翻。然而，精心设计的体验可能不具有美感，接受这一点仍然是一个挑战。要想通过设计的角度来审视亚马逊的成功，就需要由表及里的看界面之下的系统设计。

Amazon’s success brings into relief a principle that is sometimes hard to swallow in the design community–successful design is not necessarily beautiful. Of course, the notion that design is merely an aesthetic exercise was debunked long ago, with the canonization of research-led design thinking as a widely adopted design practice. Yet it can still be a challenge to accept that a well-designed experience may not be aesthetic.To examine Amazon’s success through the lens of design requires looking at the design of the systems below the interface as much as its surface.

尽管人们几乎不赞扬亚马逊的设计理念，但毫无疑问的是，其对世界的影响并不亚于那些在设计上更有名气的公司，比如苹果或宜家。看看亚马逊，认为它的设计没什么大不了的，这绝对是错的。

Amazon’s design ethos has undoubtedly made as much of an impact on the world as companies more famous for their design, such as Apple or Ikea, though it gets little credit. It would be a mistake to look at Amazon and think that design doesn’t matter.

值得注意的是，亚马逊所依赖的设计原则也为竞争对手提供了机会——每一项原则都描述了人们在购物体验中所看重的东西。亚马逊能在公司成长壮大（以及不断地壮大）的同时坚持自己的原则吗？对于其他人来说，创新和创造一个更好、更令人满意的体验的时机已经成熟。你会如何应对呢，沃尔玛？

It’s worth noting that the design principles Amazon has leaned on to craft its experience are also areas of opportunity for competitors—each of these principles describes what people value in a shopping experience.Will Amazon be able to adhere to its principles as the company grows (and grows and grows)? The time is ripe for others to innovate and create a better, more satisfying experience. Looking at you, Walmart.