Assignment No 2

Name Muqadar Ali

Sap Id 70061566

Class BSSE 7-B

Department CSIT

Teacher Ma’am Mishal Hussain

Subject SVV
Review on Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon (Written by Jared
M.Spool):

Jared’s talk is entitled Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon and I’m guessing
he’s not talking about the South American river. He begins by talking about milk. Two
years ago, you could buy Tuscan whole milk on Amazon. The reviews are hilarious.
Jared reads an over the top literary travel piece to everyone amusement. Another review
is written as a romance novel. Another is written as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Another is
in the style of a rock music review. Some of the shorter ones are hilarious too, Okay
product, but you have to buy a glass to use it.
It all starts with the content. In the case of Amazon, that’s reviews. People read reviews
on Amazon and then sometimes buy the product somewhere else. Amazon knows this
and they’re okay with that. Jared compares two reviews of a Harry Potter book. One talks
about the content of the book, another talks about the experience of getting the book
delivered from Amazon.
As more and more reviews get added over time, quality reviews get pushed down the
page. This isn’t good because reviews are so critical to purchasing decisions. Amazon
solved this problem with a small, simple device. They added a little question, this review
helpful to you? This small addition gained Amazon approximately 2.7 billion dollars in
revenue. That vital little feature was rolled out without much fanfare. With that extra
data, people can now view most valuable reviews, least valuable reviews, etc. It turns out
that the only people who want to see reviews ordered by date are the author of the book
and the people who wrote the reviews. It’s just not that valuable for customers.
 The idea was to show people products in a “treasure chest” to encourage people to
buy those products. The goal was to let people know about all the other stuff that
Amazon sells; they already know from your shopping history what you know about so
they specifically showed you stuff you didn’t know about. People got really frustrated
with this. People wanted to see things they were likely to want to buy but that wasn’t the
goal of the gold box. After a while, people stopped clicking on the gold box.
One of the products Amazon sells is an Ethernet cable selling for $500. Boing Boing
picked up on this. People starting having fun with the tags for the ludicrously overpriced
product; snakeoil, IQ test, waste of money, etc. Well, try clicking the waste of money tag;
there’s a lot tagged with that. Why would Amazon allow people to tag their products in
this way? The tag defective by design is a protest tag for anything that uses DRM.
Amazon has amazing security levels that they’ve put a lot of effort into:
1. Amazon doesn’t know who you are
2. Amazon knows you from a cookie
3. Amazon wants to reveal something only you should know.
Every time Amazon changes something, they are dabbling in changing the Tool Time.
Amazon has changed a lot of over time. But most people don’t notice because the
redesign happens slowly over time. This is in stark contrast to, say, and Facebook sudden
redesign.
Search can be hard. How do you find the first Tom Clancy book to feature Jack Ryan?
How do you find an inexpensive but high quality SLR camera? How do you find a good
toy for your six-year old niece? How do you find all the novels by Nobel Prize winning
authors?
Let’s say your new to Salsa music and you want to get the best Salsa artists. First you
have to limit your search to music to avoid getting food products. Even then, you get
greatest hits albums but you don’t know who the artists are. CD Baby handles this better
than Amazon because they have curated content.
Finally, never forget the business. Jared will now share the secret of Amazon’s business.