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When I use amazon, I find it inelegant, clunky and it seems to me there's all this distracting information dumped all over the place making it hard to find what I am looking for like a release date for example.

It must be working for them, since they obviously have the capacity to research and implement whatever would optimise sales the most. A total overhaul might irritate people familiar with it, but what's to stop them iteratively changing it and cleaning it up to be more structured, clean and easy to comprehend?

I'm referring to their product pages here rather than the menu, which does appear to have changed in useful ways. Here's an example of a similar page 5 years apart.

From 2009 From 2014

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    Amazon's power rests in their search-bar which does an excellent job of finding what I need. It will be a cold day in paradise before I even try using their multi-level menu. On the other side of the spectrum I avoid Newegg's search-bar like the plague and prefer to dig through the navigation for what I need. – MonkeyZeus Aug 25 '14 at 18:19
  • Are you sure they haven't changed their design? IIRC they started with navigation along the top, then they had a big redesign that put it along the side, and more recently they have this new design that emphasizes the search bar more prominently and puts all of the menu items in a dropdown. – bobfet1 Aug 25 '14 at 18:22
  • I think this is a great example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" type of scenario. Why do they need to change it, if it seems to be working? Also, they just visually changed their assets (like buttons which actually now act like buttons, not only looks like ones) – Majo0od Aug 25 '14 at 18:35
  • I've put this post on hold. Asking why some company hasn't done something isn't answerable with a correct answer, not unless the UX designer from Amazon global happens to be a member here and sees the question. Because of that all these questions will achieve is to be discussion topics, not questions with actual answers. And discussions are better suited to forums than Q&A sites. – JonW♦ Aug 25 '14 at 19:05
  • this is exactly why I abandoned this site. Too many questions shut down. Expert opinions are objective. makes me so sad. I wish quora and stackexchange had a baby and allowed good UI AND open questions. – Glen Lipka Aug 25 '14 at 20:54