[Sigia-l] Amazon redesign

[Thomas Vander Wal]

It seems that you have one of their design tests.  My account and
viewing the site with out it knowing me both show the previous design
(much like the plog view that appeared and then disappeared).  Amazon
does a lot of testing and gathers a tremendous amount of data, on
which they run analytics every which way.

The gold box started as a test that really caught on.  Over time
Amazon morphs gently and sometimes more drastically.

The text for links up top could be following the trend other sites
have been using to reduce images and move to more standards-based
HTML. Yahoo is going in this direction as have many other sites
(http://www.chevrolet.com did this recently and save an on bandwidth
and had a much faster loading site that still provides great
experience).

All the best,
Thomas


On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 13:07:52 -0400 (EDT), Livia Labate <liv at livlab.com> wrote:
> 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?