Amazon Watch: Road-Testing a Brand New Homepage
20.05.12
The Internet has changed a lot in the last decade, but one relatively steady presence has been the home page of Amazon.com, the Web’s largest retailer. The site has gotten more visually cluttered, for sure, and ads for the new Kindle models now usually take up the prime spot. But some elements, over the years, have remained endearingly consistent and exasperating to graphic-design connoisseurs, like the three-pane layout, heavy blue margins and cues in that awful dark orange, the color of the arrow in Amazon’s logo.
Now it seems like Amazon.com may be considering a total makeover. Last fall, the company began testing a new two-pane design, which seemed less cluttered and friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices with limited screen space. During these tests, which Amazon internally calls “Web labs,” some users saw the new design; others did not. (I saw the new design on my home PC, but not on my work computer.) Last fall, interviewing CEO Jeff Bezos before the launch of the Kindle Fire, I asked about the new design and he dismissed it as nothing more than a test whose outcome was being studied. (You can be sure the data-obsessed company was tracking and measuring every bit of feedback on how customers responded to the different designs.) Then, during Amazon’s busy holiday season, the radical new layout seemed to disappear.
Source: BusinessWeek