1% Can Be A Large Number

Internet Retailer reports:

“Over the holidays, Amazon processed at least 108 million orders and shipped on time 99% of the time, the company says. “

1% of 108,000,000 is 1,080,000. That means more than a million people didn’t get an order on time.

In the world of the internet, it’s not unusual for numbers to be in the millions: users, orders, pages, products…

Even when 99% of whatever is perfect, that 1% imperfection is still a pretty big number. Almost perfect isn’t perfect.

It’s just something to remember when we’re making all those compromises in our designs.