Amazon App’s Navigation UI [Rant]

Amazon’s e-commerce platform has had a long history of spitting on all kinds of design guidelines and sensibilities. It has made me question the value of good design time and time again - because business seems to only be booming for them regardless of this behaviour. Obviously, their service and reliability is rock solid - and that’s a big part of why people continue to be their customers (I’m a Prime subscriber myself). Anyway, I just wanted to rant about the insanely inconsistent navigation bar on the Amazon app (pictures attached). How are these part of the same app? There are three different kinds of visual treatment and two different types of behaviour for tabs. Not to mention the glitchy lines cutting in on More tab; or the different placements of the close button on the two flyouts. How is this acceptable from one of the largest companies in the world? In the production version of freaking B2C app? I’m losing my mind guys! 😣

Kendall Vernon

Genpact

a month ago

My biggest complaint with that app is that , I can't smoothly scroll the images that the buyer's have posted after they've bought the product. The scroll doesn't work smoothly at all. It lags so much. This has made me buy the same product from Flipkart many many times 😂

Aaron Vernon

Stealth

25 days ago

What's the problem again? Couldn't find anything wrong with the screenshots

Kendall Lee

Stealth

25 days ago

So the bottom navigation in any app is one of the most important ways you can navigate the apps features and in the case of the Amazon app, the tab behaviour is inconsistent. Usually each tab opens a top-level page for each of core verticals of an app. Sometimes these are also used to put user profile or settings upfront, as they are fairly important in certain apps. In the Amazon app, two of the tabs open a temporary bottom sheet on top of whichever other tab you had opened earlier. And then both of them have different visual treatments - one removes the text label and highlights the active icon while bringing a curved selection highlight around it (More). The other leaves the previous tab icon still active, has a full-height selection highlight, yet does nothing with the icon or text (Rufus). And these are both different from the other 4 tabs. Additionally, the close button (cross icon) for both bottom sheets is placed on different sides and has a different colour and size from the other. All said, these are mostly visual concerns that most people can live with. But shows a lack of attention to detail on part of such a large company. Still, they’ve got their priorities sorted. Like you said, you couldn’t see anything wrong. Might apply to more of their customers too. 😅