Yesterday, my aunt Arlene called me in a panic. She had an appointment to run to and an online shopping cart full of gifts for her grand-children and great nieces and nephews and couldn’t figure out how to ship them to their multiple addresses. Amazon.com does a pretty good job at letting you put multiple addresses in your address book but when it came time to selecting which products go to which addresses a simple 8 characters could have made a huge difference.
You know I am big fan of Amazon and their focus on continuous improvement and testing, but I think they are letting bunches of people become frustrated because of the usability challenges of a pull down select form field. You can see below a screenshot of the page Amazon provides to send your choices to multiple addresses. Notice on the right the select pull down menu and the fact that it is showing only one address. My aunt, and I am sure plenty of other people might not figure out that you have to hit the little arrow in that pull down menu to see the other addresses. It is well known that many users find drop down menus a usability challenge. I checked this page on multiple platforms and browsers and it displayed the same way.
If Amazon would have defaulted the size of the drop down to show at least 3 addresses, I don’t think she would have had a problem realizing that her full address book was in this pull down. There certainly is room in the design for it, because the item descriptions on the left all take up at least 3 lines. However, the one line pull down probably looks better form a designer’s perspective. You can see in the code snippet below how Amazon could make this process easier with just 8 characters, size=”3″.
What do you think Amazon should do? Should they eliminate the pull down all together? Sending packages to multiple addresses is a big issue this time of year. Should they let their customers become frustrated at this process? What would you do?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an interesting challenge. If Amazon puts 3 addresses there, it could be just as confusing to your Aunt (and others). It might look like three copies of the item will be shipped (one to each address). It might also look like those are the only three addresses she can ship to when her entire address book is available. Probably the most user-supportive design would be to have a design like they use for simply changing the address on the entire shipment, where they put all of your addresses on the page with radio buttons. This would require a separate page for each item in the cart. However, this would be annoying to more advanced users who want to get it all done on one page.
I think a general rule for the drop down arrow is that the information found there should either be non-critical or have a more obvious other way to get to it. Here, below the drop down box, amazon could add a button titled ‘view address book” that would take the user to the 1 page per item view. That way both advanced users who get the drop down arrow and those that don’t can get it done.
One possible solution would be to use Flash for this part of the experience. Imagine being able to drag each product to a box with the right address on it.
The techie in me hates to admit it, but I completely agree about the pull-downs – I’m amazed how many people stumble over them in testing. I talked one of my clients into a “brilliant” design simplification a few years ago involving pull-down menus, only to reverse soon after when we realized that our visitor base completely missed that there were multiple options (suddenly, it looked like we sold a much smaller variety of products).
I share Carrie’s concern, though – sometimes, whatever window you show becomes the visitor’s whole world, even if it’s 3+ options. I’d love to see them test (1) A 3-entry pull-down, (2) A 1-entry or 3-entry version + “View Your Full Address Book”, and (3) A series of 3-5 radio buttons.
The other thing I’d like to see is some kind of “Set As Default” link (or maybe something friendlier, like “Make This My Main Shipping Address”) on that first Shipping Address page. I don’t understand the logic of how Amazon picks which address shows up first, and it always seems to be some relative who I’ve sent a gift to once. The 1-entry pull-down would be a lot more effective if that 1 entry was actually what I wanted it to be.
Interesting. The drop-down control was probably selected because it’s the least amount of clicks. But this is not a “high frequency of use” situation, and therefore, the design should learn towards being *easier* to use, not *quicker* to use.
I like the idea of first showing the full address in 3 lines (like Bryan recommended) and then a large blue arrow pointing to the left *if* the user has more addresses. When they click it, a new address slides in from the left. A nice flash or AJAX-thingy.
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I’d like to see all addresses with a radio button for each item…this may make it more accessible to disabled users also.
Rather then displaying the first address as the default selection on the pull-down menu, would it be more helpful to have instructions such as “click here to select an address”? Then have validation further prompt/instruct the user if an address is not chosen.
Instead of a drop down, one options is to have the default shipping address in there as text and a button or link next to it that says “Ship to a different address” which then replaces that single text address with a radio selection of addresses from the address book with the last option being “Add a New Address” and when that gets selected adding a form beneath it with the appropriate fields.
Mgseely – that would also be a nice simple remedy.
It’s interesting, so far I don’t have any problem to buy something from amazon because I only use one address, so I don’t pay attention about the multiple address problem. Maybe amazon use the drop down menus for the simplicity reason, but to solve the multiple address problem, maybe they can add some words like ‘Which address do you want to use’ etc so the buyers will realize that they have more than one choices.
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