Bad web design - 2

I am quite sensitive to user-friendliness (or unfriendliness) of software, and of web pages in particular. I am really annoyed, when I come across poorly designed web pages. I find it very surprising that even popular websites that receive crores of hits everyday make some poor design decisions. For instance, let's look at the Amazon home page. It looks clean and convenient. However there are some annoying flaws in its design.

Let's say I want to buy eBooks for my Kindle. I will have to navigate to Kindle on the LHS pane, which would open up new menu options, and the click on eBooks.



The red line shows the natural path for my cursor to navigate from Kindle to eBooks. Unfortunately, that won't work. Because the moment cursor my crosses the line into Computers & Office, Kindle menu options would close and options for Computers & Office would open up. Ugh! :-( I will have to go back, and try to follow the green path. Unfortunately for me, following the green trajectory is not as easy as designers of Amazon like to believe. I keep crossing the line into Computers & Office, or Digital Downloads, with obvious results.

I once told a friend of mine who works at Amazon (and is involved in the design of their homepage) how irritating this is. He told me many users have complained about this and other quirky features on Amazon homepage, but the company is adamant about its design, and refuses to make changes. He also narrated that many people find the absence of Sign Out link confusing. Instead they have a Not user name link. Many users (including me) find this annoying. But it seems that Amazon has some ideological belief in support of it, and refuses to listen to its customers.

Bad web design - 1

There are some websites with good design and some with very bad design. Sometimes one wonders how very basic things are not considered while designing websites, even by leading websites. One example I came across today was of LinkedIn main page. By and large, LinkedIn is a successful and user-friendly site. However it's main page LinkedIn.com has one major flaw. It has fields for new user creation, but only a link to open the login page for registered users. Now, every person who comes to LinkedIn will be new user only once. Every time after that the user will have to click twice before being able to login. Isn't this is a very basic thing that a website like LinkedIn should get correct? I wonder these guys miss it.