

Amazon's New Design - gokhan
http://www.amazon.com/?redesign

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btipling
Beyond the new header, the giant grid of products below still looks pretty
ugly. It's probably based on sales, and it makes sense to not lose any money
for looks but it's a little depressing to think that an uglier design gets
more sales.

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degenerate
Correction: Amazon's new header.

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igorgue
I had it for a long time (about 2 months probably) by default already.

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masonhensley
Ya, me too, maybe longer. If I sign in on someone else's computer, it
sometimes has shown the old design recently.

It has been a gradual rollout.

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rorrr
It still looks like somebody threw up design blocks and poked the pile of
vomit with a stick trying to make it look nice.

It has a shit ton of random blocks that 99.99% of the visitors don't care
about and will not bother to read.

The titles of blocks are different colors and sizes (right column vs main
area).

There are 3 levels of navigation at the top, plus one multi-level menu on the
left-hand side (which is insane too - try to figure out the order of the
items).

EDIT:

I can tell you exactly how it happened. Amazon slowly matured, they
experimented a bit with their landing page. Every time they want to
revolutionize, the following happens.

Some clueless manager looks at the current page and gets the list of all the
blocks that he/she thinks are important. If they think like they are super-
smart, they will look at the CTR rates for individual links, and throw away
the least important ones. Then his bosses look at the report, and shit all
over it (referring to the "business needs" or some other bullshit like that),
and add more stuff. So the clueless manager adds more stuff to the page and
gives it to a graphic designer (and if they are smart enough, a UI-designer
will be involved). So two weeks later the designer comes up with some nice-
looking version of the pile of crap he was given. There are 10-15 meetings
with the executives of all levels discussing it for months, including the
colors of the links, and shitting all over designer's artistic decisions. All
of that costing them a ton of money, by the way. So in the end they all get
sick and tired of it, and end up with the piece of garbage that they hate the
least.

Repeat in 2-5 years.

I've seen this at large corporations at least a couple of times.

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btipling
This is the home page of Amazon. It's data driven. Every pixel is probably
calibrated for sales.

