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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

"Part of the reason why Amazon.com has taken over the retail world is because over the last decade the user experience has remained consistent and predictable."

This. The number of times I've seen somebody think they're doing the right thing by "redesigning" a web interface is absurd. Don't do it.

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I find Amazon.com to have turned into a mess. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to search only for items sold by Amazon.com. And on the product's page itself, it's confusing to figure out who is selling it. I'm pretty sure they keep moving it to confuse people.

And that mess of a model is being emulated by vendors like Walmart. One of the advantages of Walmart is that I can get in my car and go there today, but they've destroyed their own advantage by making it harder to see what your local store has in stock.

Yes, hence I prefer to use target.com and staples.com and bestbuy.com. Supposedly target.com is going that way too though, which would suck.

The good news is many manufacturers now allow you to purchase directly from their website.

An interesting contrast with Steve Yegge's claim [0] (shared here the other day [1]) that Bezos micromanages the homepage and won't allow change (obviously, both could be true).

[0] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14149986

Pocket Casts still gets me, and I encountered really weird behavior and have no idea how to fix it just a few days ago.

Not sure if I'm getting old, but if that's it I understand grumpy old people feeling righteous anger at changes.

Whenever I get usability surveys for websites, unless there’s something really egregious, I tell them to not change a thing. Especially when it’s a bank or utility. I’m going there to check a balance or pay a bill. Do I really need a change up every 18 months to meet the latest UI paradigm? I’m all for the full employment of programmers, but find something else to do than float the ‘pay bill’ and ‘logout’ links to meet this week’s subjective ideal.

For me it’s “download the latest bill as a PDF” and “pay bill”. Invariably whenever there’s a redesign the first of those two functions gets buried further in the site.

Drudge Report

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe some people are too blinded by their politics to think objectively.

The fact is that, visually speaking, Drudge Report has been the Craigslist of news for almost a quarter of a century. A big reason for its success is that it is easy and familiar to use, which is particularly attractive to its target demographic.

I guess one advantage to being highly partisan is when you do something within your product that directly helps with its success, nobody will copy it.

Eh, there's https://lite.cnn.com/en/, but it's not well advertised. It's not quite the same deal, it's not a link aggregator and actually has less formatting/images/etc than Drudge, but I think it's getting a similar minimalist aesthetic.

Minimalistic, yes, but I don't think that's exactly what Drudge is doing. Drudge Report is formatted like a newspaper front page, which is an evolved format and one that his readers are already familiar with.

If people don't like the Drudge example, perhaps they might like Antiwar.com. It may look confusing at first, but it's the same format that they've used since their beginning and it works.

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