[Sigia-l] Amazon redesign

[Samantha Starmer]

They tried to get rid of the tabs once before and the A/B testing created such a revolt by the folks who saw the new design that the tabs (which were growing out of control at that point) had to be reinstated.    I was working there at the time and it was a nightmare from a customer contact perspective - I'll be curious how this one goes...

http://news.com.com/2100-1017-236411.html?legacy=cnet

samantha



On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

> 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?
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