"Since when is having a poor user experience good for business."
You'd do better to ask which situations it is good for business,and which situations focusing on a strong UX can distract from more pressing concerns, or worse.
The article mentions one potential situation of the later type and I strongly suspect that large e-commerce firms do know what they are doing for the most part. The Expedia example you cite clearly shows that they do, in fact, experiment with their UX. (It doesn't clearly show that there is a correlation with removing fields and clutter and increasing profits, we'd need a lot more datapoints than that.)
CWuestefeld, mentions another, where they have to cater to two very different kinds of customers with different needs and usage patterns. There is no single UX that would satisfy both and I suspect that it would be prohibitively expensive to target them separately, hence business, in this situations trumps UX.
Clearly this isn't always the case and everything being equal, good UX will probably trump bad UX, but everything rarely is equal, and that's the problem.
You'd do better to ask which situations it is good for business,and which situations focusing on a strong UX can distract from more pressing concerns, or worse.
The article mentions one potential situation of the later type and I strongly suspect that large e-commerce firms do know what they are doing for the most part. The Expedia example you cite clearly shows that they do, in fact, experiment with their UX. (It doesn't clearly show that there is a correlation with removing fields and clutter and increasing profits, we'd need a lot more datapoints than that.)
CWuestefeld, mentions another, where they have to cater to two very different kinds of customers with different needs and usage patterns. There is no single UX that would satisfy both and I suspect that it would be prohibitively expensive to target them separately, hence business, in this situations trumps UX.
Clearly this isn't always the case and everything being equal, good UX will probably trump bad UX, but everything rarely is equal, and that's the problem.