Redesign at Amazon.co.uk
October 19th, 2007
They’ve been busy at Amazon.co.uk redesigning the rather dated topbar - given that this is the largest part of their page design, it’s got to be a big thing when they decide to rearrange it.
First impressions….not bad but not so good. The colours are nice and the search bar is nice and bold. However, visually I think it would benefit from some tidying. Bevel effects are a rather strange choice on today’s web and the various different uneven glows and strokes around the top bar elements jar a little.
Having said that it has now made all of the categories available from the homepage (ala amazon.com) and reiterated their recognition that (surely?) the majority of people head straight into a keyword search. However, I’m not a fan of the left-nav - a very simple improvement would be to make the main menu elements clickthrough to something. This is a real annoyance for me with these sorts of navigation - particularly evident where you hover over the ‘Books’ item and then have to move right to click…. ‘Books’ to proceed.
Still I guess it’s a tough job redesigning these sorts of elements under the gaze of millions of users and it’s hardly going to stop me buying lots of stuff from Amazon and appreciating all the awesome data widgets.
EDIT: Erm, I’ve been known to be rather slow before, has it been like this ages? Yup, it seems I am just very slow given there are blog posts about this from the beginning of last month.
EDIT 2: Ok, maybe I get it now - a surf around some other blogs and it seems this might be an international redesign also being trialled on Amazon.com that has been showing up intermittently for a while for various people. Which actually makes the issues I’ve mentioned more major if this has been decided upon as the future direction for (presumably) all of Amazon’s regional sites.
On October 21st, 2007 at 1:12 pm MS said:
It showed up for me the other day (I think it must have been on the 15th) when I was surfing at work. When I got home I noticed it had reverted back to the old design and I haven’t seen the new one since then! I thought I’d run a quick search on Google for “amazon.co.uk redesign” and that’s how I came across your blog post.
Looking forward to seeing when it shows up for good now.
On April 1st, 2008 at 3:48 pm Brockley Jon said:
Indeed - for me it has only just showed up! But for my colleague, he can’t see it! And it’s now April…
On April 15th, 2008 at 3:22 pm David said:
Its only just shown up for me now too.
Wonder why I am so far behind
Was almost going to post an article on it until I realised some people have had it for over half a year. heh
It is certainly an improvement looks wise.
Lets hope it keeps the full functionality of the old one.
I hope they sort out how the results/browse are listed.
It is a bit annoying at the moment.