I went to a talk by one of Amazon's UX researcher guys, and Amazon's clutter boils down to a simple thing:<p>Cram a bunch of ways of finding products on to every page (except for the checkout flow), and people will find at least one thing that works for them.<p>It's completely offensive to our designer sensibilities, but what they've found is that users just tune out the parts of the page that don't work for them and go right to the parts they use (almost like muscle memory). It's the kind of thing you can only do on a site with a lot of repeat customers.
It takes me about one minute to get an overview of opinion pieces on that new page and to find out whether I want to read anything. During that one minute I will scroll all the way down. I don’t even have to think about it. This is one of the New York Times’ more rigid layouts which means that I can actually systematically read the headline of every single piece on that page without getting lost. Cluttered is the last thing I would call it.<p>Sure, they could display less. Ten rows, two columns – that sounds to me like they picked a nice round number without much thought. Five would do but in this day and age scrolling is easy. (This guy also seems to have a screen with a low resolution. I have only 900 vertical pixels and I have to press page down three times.)
This is the proverbial signal vs. noise ratio with a twist that N<i>signal</i> + N<i>noise</i> is ridiculously high.<p>You're not crazy.<p>We all want clean sites and easily accessed information. I'd pay good money for a site that presented me with nigh-perfectly organized personalized "information" (be it news, sports, articles, tech articles, etc.), but nobody can do it.<p>So in lieu of the impossible they use the shotgun method, and it works.<p>Purists hate it. $ > purists.
So does he think there should just be less content? It's one thing for a blog (e.g. daring fireball) to have a sweet minimalistic design that only shows you one thing at a time... but sites like Amazon and the NYTimes have an <i>absolutely massive</i> amount of content that they're trying to provide. How is the NYTimes supposed to make a sleek, un-cluttered interface when they have 3000 new articles <i>every day</i>? And it's not junk -- nearly every one of those articles is thoughtful and well-written. They all deserve some attention.<p>Do you have any examples of websites that have ginormous amounts of content and simple, un-cluttered interfaces? And don't say google, because that's different.
I'm pretty sure that Amazon, at least, is testing the hell out of their layouts. You may not be able to comprehend the guy who thinks "Fabric softener!", but he's probably out there, spending more money than the people who prefer less random products.<p>...not that that makes you crazy, though. Maybe crazy people just spend more money online than you do. :)