I’m grateful to live in a time when online grocery shopping is a mature technology, but there are three things that irk me so much about Amazon Whole Foods that I’m compelled to rage blog about it while waiting for my latest order to arrive.
A quick disclaimer: I am not a UX developer, nor do I play one on TV. UX intersects with some of my favorite back-end enterprise engineering concepts: processes, workflows, lifecycles–the “and then” intersections of software and narrative and humans. I’m professionally UX-adjacent.
Bad Substitutions
The issue that got me started was a bad substitution. When a human at a Whole Foods begins putting together an order, they will send text messages when an item is out of stock and suggest a replacement. This sounds like a great idea, but three specific things about their implementation irritate me.
- There is a narrow window to decline substitutions once the shopper gets started. If you miss the text because you’re in a work meeting or “otherwise indisposed”, the default behavior is “accept substitution”. The “opt out” design coupled with the pressure of a deadline that starts and stops without my consent is a recipe for an interruption-averse person like me.
- There is no way to globally turn off substitutions. It’s possible to turn off substitutions on a per-item basis. I’ll do this for lactose-free items because getting an item with lactose as a substitution is common. Doing it for a cart full of dozens of items? That’s not going to happen. I don’t agree with the implication that “most items have obvious substitutes” or another use of “opt out” here. Either on the page or in account settings, there needs to be a “Substitute None/All” button or account-level preference.
- The substitutions are not well-chosen. Picking a good substitution is hard for both algorithms and people. Especially with ingredients, knowing the intended use may rule out obvious substitutions and suggest unorthodox ones. The only people who can reliably pick good substitutes are the customers themselves. The case in point today is the chili powder I wanted to make Instant Pot chili has been replaced with 15,000 heat-unit chili pepper flakes. I will never, Never, NEVER use something so deliberately toxic. Well, not for eating at least.
Replacements in Past Purchases
I tend to shop out of my “Past Purchases”. I’m not an experimental cook and not fond of discovering unwanted ingredients in near matches, like olives in the suggested Mediterranean tuna fish salad. Yuck. Unlike the suggestions while the shopper’s shopping, the feature here is Amazon showing a replacement item for something in my Past Purchases but is currently out of stock.
This irks me most because I work on systems where logging, history, what can and can’t be deleted are mission critical. It’s even a shade of political, this revisionist history where I expect a list of all the things I’ve bought before that now includes things I’ve never–and would never–buy as well. To be fair, the items are tagged with a little black “replacement” marker, but the pictures of the replacement items might be indistinguishable from the originals, and clicking through to the item description destroys the whole flow of shopping due to the lack of a good “back button” or “pop-out”. My implicit sense of everything in “Past Purchases” being safe and familiar and previously purchased leads me to click faster and more confidently. It’s just not true. Stupid brain!
Since I need to click through to the description to evaluate a replacement, I’d much rather have a “see replacements” button where I choose and therefore clearly know that I’m in the replacement exception workflow. Yet again, an “opt in” approach would be a welcome change.
I’ve also noticed that replacements for conventional items are rarely other conventional items. While it makes sense to suggest an organic that is practically the same thing, there’s a feeling of sneaky upselling here. Repeated unintended violations of trust and expectation can quickly cross over into suspicions that they were intended all along.
Orders Not Completed
There is nothing worse than going through what I think is the whole process, moving on to other activities, and wondering why nothing has shown up during my delivery window. It’s always because there was one more button to click or confirmation to make that I simply missed. Part of this is my inherent distractibility with dozens of tabs in multiple accounts open next to my grocery shopping tab. Or text notifications going off. Or hearing the robotic voice of my fleet carrier announcing “jump complete” from Elite Dangerous running in the background. Yes, it’s partly my fault for being so distractible and for not watching for email confirmation after I think I’ve completed the order. Being done in Amazon is just another page; it does not clearly, obviously convey “done” or “not done”.
It’s not just Amazon’s ordering workflow I have this problem with, so it’s absolutely me. However, good software helps users avoid mistakes, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one having this problem. And data vacuum Amazon must know this from knowing every click and when I made it while on their site.
There’s a simple solution: put a lifecycle progress diagram at the top of the page and keep it there as I progress through each stage of finalizing my order. Show me the whole process and my progress within it. I’m not a fan of digital confetti, but give me some kind of visual or audiovisual payoff when I’m done–something notable enough that I’ll remember it the next time I order. A little gold UX star at the end would be lovely or maybe just a big animated checkbox: there’s nothing in the world as satisfying to me as checking a checkbox to memorialize that this to-do is done.
How do you feel?
The unexpected place this post has taken me is how these software experience choices make me feel. The annoyance and frustration I feel isn’t just because I got the wrong $3 ingredient, it’s because a software powerhouse like Amazon should know better. That leads to an even worse feeling, that Amazon’s using the “Opt Out” theme to upsell us or force us to accept substitutes we’d never initially choose but will live with once it’s on our door.
Bait and switch is a tried-and-true technique in the software industry (:cough: Microsoft in the 1990s :cough:), but it reminds of some other things: Your online date shows up and he doesn’t look anything like his picture. You notice a mysterious $5 fee on your credit card statement while paying your bills. There’s a dependence on us just settling for whatever because we gone this far or we have other things to do.
Do I feel irked enough to quit Amazon Whole Foods completely? No. The same-day delivery and the Whole Foods product line are powerful pluses that changed my relationship to online grocery shopping. I mean, Pea Pod in SF had some incredibly hunky former UPS drivers “delivering” which was nice, and Fresh Direct had some of the best produce pickers, but the same-day thing is now my must-have feature. I may try a few other online grocery services to see if anybody’s starting to out-innovate Amazon. Target and Walmart are particularly keen on muscling in on Amazon’s territory. Hopefully they’ll force Amazon to address some of these issues and innovate, because there’s no way in Hell I’m dropping my Amazon Prime subscription while The Expanse is in production and feeding my other ravenous need, for hard science fiction.