Aral Balkan

So, after the LiquidWeb debacle, I start looking for alternative hosting provider for OSFlash and it dawns on me that this is the perfect chance to start using Amazon's EC2.

So I try to log out of my regular account with Amazon to sign in with my developer account. Umm... well... I can't seem to log out. So I search for "logout". Lo and behold, I see a link in the results: "Need help with logging out?" Apparently, I'm not the only one who has tried to log out of Amazon.com. So I click the link and it brings me to a page titled Signing Out.

So here are the instructions for logging out of Amazon.com:

1. Click the link near the top of the home page that says "If you're not (your name), click here."
2. On the next page, leave the e-mail and password spaces blank and click the Amazon.com tab at the top of the page.
3. Close the browser to prevent your name or 1-Click settings from appearing on the public terminal.

All right, so maybe they want to make it as hard as possible for people to log out (that's really secure for people logging from an Internet cafe, by the way, especially if they have one-click checkout enabled) but what about logging in. Surely, they want that to be as simple as possible, right?

Here are the instructions for logging in to Amazon.com:

To log back in to our web site:

1. Click the "personalized recommendations" link that appears just under the tabs on our home page. If you don't see this link, but are greeted by someone else's name, click the link that says "If you're not (your name), click here."
2. On the next page, sign in with your e-mail address and password.

I'm confused. Whatever happened to using common conventions and keeping things simple? What exactly is so wrong with the convention of having a Login link (or, better, having the login form available throughout) and having that change to a Logout link once the user is logged in that Amazon had to go an invent this convoluted process with its own vocabulary?

Craziness. I hate having to lie to a web application just to log out. It's just so wrong!

The Logging out is hard to do (on Amazon.com) article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.