[abledon]

Amazon aggressively A/B tests their shopping site -- if the UI was suboptimal, they wouldnt be showing it that way. so much information is crammed into one page. look at most sites in asia and it will be similar.

It seems to me that your complaints _are_ what lots of other people actually want to see, (someone saying: yes amazon, please DO show me 20 variations on lightbulbs after i just bought some because Im a shopaholic, i dont do much research and I'm one of the millions of people who click on google ads _all the time_ because i dont know how to go find what i need, the site has to SHOW me what i need)

[jrockway]

I think A/B testing requires A or B to actually be good. Imagine a data-driven restaurant that uses A/B testing to determine what customers want to eat. A is cockroaches. B is tarantulas. The data says that more customers prefer tarantulas! But they still go out of business because the steak next door is much better than either option.

[cthalupa]

>The data says that more customers prefer tarantulas! But they still go out of business because the steak next door is much better than either option.

This is where your analogy sort of falls apart. Amazon seems to be doing the opposite of going out of business to the steakhouse next door.

You can of course get good results out of a bad process, but this is usually not something that happens in a sustained manner over such a long period of time. Processes that result in positive effects for periods of years or decades are generally sound.