Kindle iPhone App: Purchased by Accident? No Problem.
Miranda Capra / Consumer Products / Usability / Web & SoftwareMy husband downloaded the Kindle application for his iPhone recently, and, despite having a PhD in Computer Science/HCI, immediately proceeded to accidentally purchase a book. He started off well, downloading a free sample of the book from the Kindle store (screenshots 1 + 2). When he reached the end of the sample (screenshot 3) he wanted pricing information for purchasing, so he clicked on “Buy Now” and poof! purchased the book (screenshot 4). I’m not sure what surprised me more – the fact that Amazon, which has been doing online shopping for almost 15 years, managed to create an application that made it so easy to accidentally purchase a book, or that the accidental purchase seemed to be anticipated. Because after purchasing the book, the confirmation screen asked “Purchased by accident?” and provided a large “Cancel this order” button that immediately canceled the order. After I found out how easy it was to cancel the order, I had to try this myself, and decided that the design wasn’t nearly as terrible as I thought at first. Let me explain…
The first two screenshots are of the Kindle store, and clearly follow Amazon’s online shopping cart style. The user can see the book title, cover, price, etc., and has a choice to purchase immediately or to download a sample for free. Purchasing immediately follows Amazon’s “1-Click” shopping model, which is familiar to frequent users of Amazon’s online store. The confirmation screen provides feedback – you purchased the order, it will be charged and shipped. It also provides useful feed forward in the form of buttons to do comment next-step actions: continue shopping, or go to the Kindle app to read the book.
The second two screenshots are from the Kindle app. Screenshot #3 is what you get when you reach the end of the book. There is a “buy now” link, but it is missing three key clues from that online store: pricing, mention of “1-click” purchasing, and use of a button. That button is a critical cognitive affordance, or a clue that helps the user understand what software does. We’ve discussed cognitive affordances in an earlier post about the Sidekick, and compare them to physical affordances, which are the actual features provided by the software. A button and link function just about the same, but using a link here is very misleading – users won’t expect a link to complete a purchase.
The most interesting piece to me is the last screenshot. The existence of “Purchased by accident? Cancel this order” says to me that the developers of this application have realized that users are accidentally purchasing books, and have added this feed forward to the next most natural action, canceling the purchase. Either that, or this is a very clever design by Amazon to increase sales by making it very easy to accidentally purchase books, and decrease customer outcry by making it equally easy to cancel, but as a Coke executive once said when asked whether they had planned the whole New Coke incident, I don’t think Amazon is either that smart or that stupid. Normally I would be outraged that Amazon had released an application that made it so easy to accidentally purchase an item. But if it’s also that easy to cancel the order, is the design really that bad? Sure, of course I would prefer that the design be good enough that the accidental purchase never happened, but failing that they’ve got a pretty good design for correcting the error.
Actually, the whole thing reminds me of the clipboard options when you paste formatted text into a Microsoft Office application (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) After you paste, a little drop-down menu shows up that asks how you want the text you just pasted formatted. While it’s a little unnerving sometimes to see the wild formatting that happens before you pick the option you want, it’s a very handy feed-forward mechanism to make the pasting process smoother. You can even pull down the menu multiple times and try out each option, see which you like best. Sure, you could go into “Edit…Paste Special…Unformatted Text,” but this is much simpler, and has really crossed the line from an undo action (ooops, I meant to paste as plain text) to an alternate path to completing the action (paste first, then decide how you want it formatted). The Amazon Kindle application doesn’t quite cross that line because the credit card transaction can’t be undone, it can only be refunded, but it comes very close.
I’ll keep my eye on the Kindle iPhone application, see if they fix the design to prevent this error in the first place. But I can honestly say that this was the best accidental purchase experience I’ve ever had.
-
Kevin
I have been searching the internet, and Amazon.com for that matter, for information on how to “undo” a purchase when one has moved past the screenshots that you mentioned. A friend of mine was looking at my Kindle this evening after Thanksgiving dinner, when he hands me the Kindle and proceeds to tell me that he thinks he made a purchase. By the time I grabbed the Kindle out of his hands, he had moved to the “home” screen. He did indeed make a purchase, for a $40 book I might add, but there was no way to cancel the purchase or let Amazon know that it was done in error. What I did do was to contact Amazon via email and explained the situation and hopefully they can delete it from my Kindle. Thanks for your post, it was helpful.
1 Comment...