Amazon.com Redesigned for the better?

For many years I considered Amazon.com to be the epitome of great ecommerce design. About 2 years ago, I changed focus. Amazon started to do too much, in my opinion. Cluttering the interface with elements that, as far as I could tell, we rarely used.

A few weeks back Amazon redesigned their site and made a number of dramatic changes. Some were great, some are more perplexing.

How do I login?

As a usability consultant, I review hundreds of websites each month, both good and bad. I consider myself very web savvy, but even I had trouble trying to login.

Here’s a timeline of my experience trying to login:

1. The top of the page, directly to the right of the logo is a sentence. “Hello. Sign in to get personalized recommendations. New customer? Start Here”. The problem was that the link was on the wrong text. The words “Sign In” are not links to the sign in page.
2. I tried clicking the “Your Account” link on the top right. - The page this linked to wasn’t any help. In fact, it looked like I was already logged in… but of course, wasn’t. It also didn’t give me the option to login.
3. Finally I found it. Clicking on “Your Amazon.com” underneath the logo reveals a completely different page than “Your Account.” While it didn’t log me in, it finally gave me a login button.

Mystery-Meat Navigation

At first I applauded Amazon.com’s switch to a vertically oriented navigation. Throughout the years of the classic horizontal tabbed interface they struggled with problems. Amazon.com sells a lot of merchandise and as such has many navigational items. The vertical orientation gives them additional room for navigational text (“Movies, Music & Games” vs. 3 separate tabs previously).

Bravo Amazon…. almost….

Clicking on one of the main navigational areas… “Books” for example, takes you to a new page about Books, as I would expect. What I didn’t expect was that the navigation would go away and be replaced with horizontal navigation.

A Few Others

Finally Amazon has improved it’s accessibility. Working closely with the National Federation for the Blind, shopping should be much easier for the visually impaired.

I wasn’t expecting Amazon to validate to any w3 standard, which it doesn’t, but I am particularly puzzled by it’s lack of a Doctype.

A site which has struggled with clutter has made a dramatic improvement to it’s product list pages and home page. The use of whitespace and imagery is much improved.

Overall I’m impressed. A lot of time, effort and most importantly, thought has gone into the redesign. The problems I addressed here are major problems but could be addressed rather simply, especially the login issue. I’ll be watching closely as they polish this design over the next few months.