Design exercise:
A quick redesign of the Amazon.com homepage
January 14th, 2010 Discussion {2}
After spending more time on Amazon.com over the holidays, it occurred to me how badly the site could use a redesign. Or perhaps I should use the word refresh; I’m sure there are loads of well-researched usability models behind the current layout of the site, but it to me it feels like a dated, crowded, messy experience. I always feel bombarded with a million links to content Amazon should realize by now I’m not interested in.
In an afternoon I mocked up this fresh take on the Amazon.com homepage. While it was very tempting to totally rethink their information architecture, I decided to work with their existing layout for the sake of realistic continuity.
I focused on improving two weak points of their current design – design clutter/noise, and visual prioritization of important features like search and the cart.
This was just a quick exercise, so it’s far from complete, but I do wish Amazon.com looked more like this.
Click the image above to see the design at full size.
Click the image above for a design comparison.
Menu rollover detail
Hey Neal!
Ever the re-designer eh? Maybe you should get a job doing this again, you’re so good!
Personally I actually have come to like some amount of noise/clutter because I’m finding more and more websites that make it near impossible to find what you need. Amazingly this is usually the case with the whole ‘contact us about complaints’ section.
Just another note that I think the text might be a bit too big, the size of the images reminds me of the apple home page.. It’s strange to me because the rest of the site is great, but that home page is always a ginormous hit in the face.. I barely ever actually read what’s on it.
Must be fun being able to do that sort of design stuff. Oh check out my mentor’s blog.. I’ve been reading it lately and it’s not only interesting for animation but he’s really into story.
http://www.synchrolux.com/
Dad
Looks like a big improvement to me. I’ve been wading through a few corporate websites lately and most of them are distinctly user unfriendly.
Cheers. Dad
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