[Sigia-l] Amazon redesign

[Pabini Gabriel-Petit]

Hi Livia

I visited the Amazon site last night after not having done so for nearly
three weeks and noted the differences in the UI, but didn't have time to
explore. I'm really glad you took those screen shots and have documented
those changes, because today, the UI is back to what it was before. They
must have been doing one of their online tests. I liked the simpler layout.

Thanks for sharing!

Pabini

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Livia Labate" <liv at livlab.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 10:07 AM
Subject: [Sigia-l] Amazon redesign


> 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
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