Amazon’s Positive User Experience (UX) Rivals Social Media Sites, New Survey Finds

Website Users Are Most Likely to Return to a Site with Useful Content, Even If the Site Does Not Have the Best User Experience

Website users believe Amazon has the best user experience (UX) among top websites, despite the continued popularity of social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, according to a new survey conducted by Clutch, the leading B2B research, ratings and reviews company.

The largest share (21%) of website users surveyed think Amazon’s UX outperforms Facebook and YouTube, even though both sites have more than double the visitors of Amazon.

Sites like Facebook and YouTube are considered to have good UX reviews, but survey respondents prefer the usability of e-commerce platforms, which gives Amazon an edge over social media platforms.

“Generally, the e-commerce experience is more straightforward. It’s built out of small design patterns that you’d find across all the websites,” said Dennis Lenard, managing partner at Creative Navy, a design agency based in London that focuses on UX and UI.

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Highly Trafficked Websites Have Good UX

Most survey respondents say the high-profile, highly trafficked social media websites offer a particularly good user experience. Of these, Facebook and YouTube lead, with 83% of people respectively saying these sites have a good UX.

Other sites identified as having good UX in addition to Amazon include Gmail (73%), Netflix (60%), and Instagram (47%).

The survey suggests that businesses can learn from the usability patterns these websites establish.

People Return to a Website for Content

A website with “useful content” is one that people will return to; nearly half of survey respondents (48%) indicated this. That compares to 25% of respondents who would revisit a website that’s easy to navigate, and 12% who said they return to a website mainly because their friends and peers are on the site.

If a website’s content meets a user’s needs, only certain UX barriers such as slow load time and unreliability will stop them from browsing.

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“Users often accept a compromise on user experience for the benefit of better or more content,” Lenard said. “At the end of the day, users care about the content more than they care about the design.”

The compromise users are willing to make for content is particularly evident with Facebook.

Although 13% of website users believe Facebook has a poor UX, more people (30%) visited Facebook the most in the past month than any other site.

People Will Leave Unreliable Websites

Website users have two primary frustrations when browsing online: page unreliability (24%) and slow load time (20%).

Over half of people will stop using a website for a particular session if it is unreliable (54%) and/or if it loaded slowly (53%). Nearly two-thirds of people (63%) will permanently abandon a site if it is consistently unreliable.

Clutch surveyed 612 people about their browsing habits and opinions on user experience on top websites.

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