[Sigia-l] Amazon redesign

[Livia Labate]

I don't know how long it's been like this because I haven't been there in
a couple of days but there seems to have been significant changes to the
Amazon interface/organization.

In case it looks different to you:
- http://www.livlab.com/stuff/amazon_2004-10-05.gif
- http://www.livlab.com/stuff/amazon-store_2004-10-05.gif

* There are two tabs, Welcome (home page) and All Categories (directory
listing). It's a totally valid solution, but defeats the purpose of having
tabs anymore. So why have they kept them?

* If you just hover over the All Categories tab a screen comes up with
every possible category. Which is a nice shortcut and diminishes the tab
clutter of yore, but I wonder about its scalability.

* The utilitarian navigation up the top is textual now (and looks kind of
unbalanced in the design to me, like it should be lower or higher in the
layout). They added "Store" which I thought would be the items I sell on
Amazon, but it's actually my recommendations page. The Gold Box (which
always offers me products that can't be shipped to my country) is now just
an icon with "Gold" as it's ALT text. Humm, weird affordance...

* When you click on "Store", for example, the tab changes, so now I have
"Livia's Store" (instead of Welcome) and "All Categories". I wonder about
the potential confusion of changing tab labels, but then again, when you
have only two (which makes me wonder again about why they are sticking
with the tabs). I clicked on another category (books) and it populated the
first tab as well, so it's not incremental (adds the categories I visit,
which would explain why they would keep tabs).

* The search seems to be consistently on the top now, but there are two
search boxes - internal to Amazon and its categories and the A9 web
search. Maybe it's a branding decision, but I would rather they were the
same thing.

If you enter a search string (i.e: I was looking for a book by Charles
Schulz called "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Snoopy" and typed in "It
Was a Dark and") the product search returned numerous books but not the
one I wanted, whereas the same query on A9 returned Snoopy's book (linked
back to Amazon) as it's #4 item.

Just some initial reactions. Thoughts?

Cheers,

Livia Labate
liv at livlab.com > http://livlab.com < http://aifia.org