The other day Jurassic Park caught my eye as I was flipping through some TV stations (yes, I watch, only sometimes though). Being a child of the information age, I’m both easily distracted and a big fan of factual data and the interesting connections between that data. At this time, my internal monologue was something like: ‘oh yeah, I read Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and probably half of at least two other Crichton books. I want to see what he’s up to these days.’
The first association I have in my mind whenever I consider books or literature is Amazon. They’ve done a great job of occupying that associative gold mine in my mind, and I can only assume this extends to many many other people. One day I look forward to exploring more about first associations and their importance in business, but for now let’s get back on track.
I quickly went to my computer and searched Crichton’s name on Amazon. I even put his full name in, not just his last name. As I hadn’t used Amazon in a while, my mind was fairly fresh and free from expectations shaped by prior experience.
What I get is a list of products from 1 to 16, showing ‘top results’. First reaction: disappointment. What I wanted was a pulse check, a sense of what is happening in the world of Michael Crichton. Instead, I get a shopping list, and one that isn’t even organized in a meaningful fashion (e.g. not by recency, by sales numbers, by rating, etc). How the world’s largest bookseller can get this wrong is beyond me. The questions I wanted to have answered were:
- What books has he written (so I can see if I want to order some)
- What has been the history of the author (what themes does he write about, how have they changed, etc)
- What is the author thinking about now, and doing next
For the first question, I would have liked a list of books by date, and links to their respective editions. For the second question, I would have liked a professional- or user-submitted review about the author, a general overview that is up to date. For the third question, I would have liked either a user- or author-submitted description of what’s going on now, perhaps with links to relevant resources and articles (e.g. if an interview was in NYT recently).
Other things on this page I would have loved would be users discussing the author’s work, friends interested in his work, and similarity links for writing style, subject matter, etc.
Some of these are available on Amazon. They’ve done a lot of work on their UI and shopping experience to provide these tools. But they’re still relying on a single method of displaying results, instead of a portal / vertical search method that recognizes and structures data, such as ‘Michael Crichton is an author, therefore show author page’.
Continuing my experience, as I had heard about Amazon allowing authors to have blogs a while back, I hoped I could find one for him. I clicked around on his name within a book and in a few other places, but I couldn’t come up with one. I even searched a few times on Google. Next reaction: annoyance. I hear about something – Amazon’s author blogs – and I can’t find any mention of it, other than a few posts within Amazon’s daily blog. No ‘this author does not have a blog’, instead no trace whatsoever. Maybe I’m crazy and this feature never existed.
I mentioned I came in with a fresh mind, but I did come with some expectations – namely, the experiences of other sites, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, which provide cross-linked, factual resources for different media. These sites are just a better way to provide information. They both make sense and are very logically structured. The question that I brought with me, ‘what is happening’, is an incredibly common question that people have about authors. Although I wouldn’t argue that ‘I heard about this book’ is the most asked question, I would argue that the ‘what is happening’ question is the second most asked question. Yet 12 years after launching, Amazon still cannot answer that question.
I think that the vast majority of users out there that use Amazon, aside from those that simply want one book and to be done, are what I would call an aspirational casual reader. That is, they aspire to know more and be more literary, but they haven’t the time to be expert hobbyists. Why do I assume this? Because most users across almost all product types are exactly like this – they want easy ways to raise their commitment and interest levels. We are inherently curious, and if we can get data points that build off of where we are ever so slightly, we can get more engaged in things. Products that are well designed understand where people are and give them easy ways to do this.
In the end, it was my job to put together a composite experience between what information was on Wikipedia and IMDB, and what was for sale on Amazon. This composite was both disjointed and time-consuming, and the spark of interest that I had in reading a particular book was lost due to time waste and a feeling that Amazon isn’t meeting my needs as a consumer.