Amazon.co.uk – a usability review

It seems unusual for a leading world-wide brand to redesign their website and make it worse, much worse. Although it is common in the film and music industry for sequels to flop, it appears that Amazon really are in the stage of making ‘the difficult second album’.

The original Amazon didn’t have much wrong with it.  Sure, the sign in process was a mess, and a new shopping section seemed to be appearing every month, but other than that, I was happy with the overall user experience.  I was surprised this week by logging onto Amazon.co.uk and being greeted with new design (note you may not see the new design every time you login). My first impressions were that not much has changed, ok, the main navigation has moved to the left-hand side, and thematic shopping zones have been grouped which reduces the sprawling expanse of tabs that I was mentioning earlier.

But I was wrong. After trying to use the site I instantly became frustrated.  You’re probably thinking this is normal, I already had experience with the old version of the site, so surely I just need time to become acquainted with the new design?  What annoyed me was not that my previous experience didn’t count anymore, it was that my ability to complete simple tasks were now made much more difficult due to unforgivable design decisions.

First, let’s look at the old and new designs:

Make a wish
I check my Amazon wish list regularly, mainly to find out things like ‘is that game I’m interested in below my threshold price?’.  With the redesign, I couldn’t even find how to access my wish list as the link has been renamed to Gifts & Wish Lists, and when I first read Gifts I didn’t read any further.  Even after selecting this link, there was little feedback to confirm which section I was in.  I still couldn’t see how to find my wish list. After scanning the page I noticed that a new navigation bar had appeared with nine options on it, one in the middle being wish list.  What was a one-click process in the old design is now two clicks, but more importantly, takes much longer to navigate to as you have to wait for two pages to load.

Navigation
The old design was clear in that the user could always see all of the sections of the site at once. This made it easy to browse from Music, to Games to Books, no matter where you where, you were only one click away from another section of interest. The new vertical navigation list expands with sub-categories when the user hovers over an option.  There are a few problems with this menu system. Firstly, If I’m interested in the Books section, when I hover over the Books menu item, it is not selectable by itself, I am forced to select Books again from the menu that has just appeared (see below, note image grabbed from Amazon.com as Amazon.co.uk is showing me the old design today):

Again, extra effort and delay has been introduced to a process that was fine beforehand. Sadly, it gets worse. If the menu item I’m interested is at the bottom of the menu, then there is a disparity between what the user wants, and how they select it.  For the user, the quickest way to select an item at the bottom is to move diagonally towards their item, however doing so will activate the main menus beneath as they operate with a hover mechanism.  The user has to figure out that the way to select the item they want is to firstly move across, then move down.  What path they want to take is in green, the path they have to take is in red (see below):

I would be very keen to see the usability data that shows how many users were clicking on the main categories, how many errors were made in choosing menu options, or how much extra time was added to the user’s task when using this new menu.  Incidentally, by sticking with their horizontal navigation approach and using this hover approach, they may not have had these problems.

But still there’s more design issues.

Once the user has chosen their shopping area of choice, let’s say Video Games, when they enter that section of the store, the main navigation is then hidden.  Can I repeat that?  The main navigation has now gone, violating one of the most basic principles of usability, visibility.

By looking at the above image, is it obvious how to get to another section, let’s say Music? The main navigation that was down the left-hand side has now gone, but maybe you see the link that says Shop All Departments.  Well, that doesn’t take you to the main navigation that you were used to, in fact, you have to hover over the small arrow to the right of that link.  Have these designers heard of Fitts’ Law?

Hover Bother
The web is about clicking right?  Hyperlinks are well understood, and the expected method of interaction. But hovering?  On the Amazon site, the hover target areas are very small, thus introducing delay into using the interface.  This means that on the main Amazon homepage, the user has three modes of interaction; clicking on links, using combo boxes, and hovering, easy eh?

I really don’t know what Amazon were thinking of for this design to get as far as it has.  As I mentioned earlier, I would like to have been present during their usability evaluations, maybe they will publish their design decisions for all to see.

Amazon used to be famous for its one-click simplicity, now it seems it’s more like three-clicks, two hovers and a … maybe I’ll just check out their competitor’s sites.

Video Games Usability and User Experience

In future posts I’ll be discussing video games, however the aim will not be to review a game in a traditional manner, but instead to discuss the areas of a game where the designer’s intentions do not meet the player’s expectations. To put this in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) terminology, we’ll be discussing video game usability and user experience. We could argue over what these terms really mean, and we might just do that another time, but for now, let’s say that video game usability is concerned with a game’s ability to communicate its capabilities to the player in an intuitive manner. So what I’m interested in is moments in a video game where any of the following happen; shouting at the game, wanting to give up, palms sweat, increased heart rate, loosing track of time, thinking about how to control your character, difficulty level, the list could go on.

Why do some games ‘feel good’? Can we really expect to develop a technique to measure enjoyment and if so, can we quantify it?

As you’ve probably guessed by now, the area of video games usability and user experience is multidisciplinary and multimodal, with the main aim being to improve the overall quality or experience of a game.

Let’s be clear here, we’re not trying to devise a magic formula to design quality games, but we are interested in techniques which allow us to identify, measure and resolve issues with video games.

Higher resolution on the Eee

Since I installed Linux back onto the Eee yesterday (previous post), I’ve noticed that when using the External Display application (display-settings is the command line name of this app), several new modes are available. The highest resolution my Eee would support out of the box was 1024×768, however the following are now available; 1152×864, 1280×1024 and 1680×1050. I have the Eee connected to a Dell 20″ widescreen monitor and 1152×864 is the only one that works. Trying to use 1280×1024 causes the monitor to report a message saying this mode is not supported, and using 1680×1050 results in the screen being out of sync. Still, 1152×864 is not too bad, at least it’s easy to read and performs well while surfing and using any app.

I guess these new modes appeared as a result of the process I went through yesterday when installing VLC. One of the steps was to do a ’sudo apt-get update’ command, telling the OS to look for updates for the Eee. Buoyed up by these new settings, I had to look to see if any of my others issues had been fixed. Sadly no; my 16GB USB pen still isn’t recognized, the Eee can still only 1GB RAM (despite 2GB being installed), and I can’t use the Eee in lid-closed mode. Despite this however, using the Eee at the new resolution feels great. Coming back to Linux from Windows XP is such a world of difference, my enthusiasm for the Eee has returned with gusto.

By installing my Firefox extensions again, I notice Scribefire has also been updated and now includes a few features which stopped me using it before (having both tags and categories). This is my first blog entry typed on the Eee (I had been using MacJournal on OS X), I imagine the first of many.

If you only do one thing today Eee-fans, do a software update on both your OS and Firefox extensions.

And the best OS for the Eee PC is …

I haven’t used the Eee in quite a while now, since I put XP onto it in fact. I think the time has come to restore Linux back onto the machine and see if that encourages me to use it more. As XP removes the built-in restore partition, I had to use the restore DVD that comes with the Eee. In about 10 minutes the default OS was re-installed and ready to use, I was very pleased with how quick and easy this process was, installing XP feels like half a days work. As I store all my user data onto a 4GB SD card or somewhere online, I didn’t have to worry about backing up any data.

Evidence of design
When moving to a new OS or upgrading to a new version of your current OS, it is sometime difficult to assess the usefulness that the new features offer. It’s only when those new features are absent do you realize how they have become embedded in your workflow, and how an OS is a lot less productive without them. If I use a computer which does not have OS X features such as Exposé or Quick Look, they just feel, well, broken. So how would going back to Linux feel once I’d been using XP on the Eee?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder
As it turns out, going back to Linux did make me feel an absence of something. There was an absence of virus checking, notification windows, balloon popping and all-too-frequent software updates. Absence has never felt better. The Eee felt fast, but what hit me more was that out of the box, the Linux OS comes with everything you need. Windows XP comes with nothing, I had to go get a PDF reader, something half-decent to write text in, Firefox (you can’t seriously expect me to use IE), there’s no software to make use of the built in webcam, no multi-client IM software and the list goes on.

A few small repairs
I did make a few changes however. I still prefer using the Eee in full desktop mode (see my previous post). If you do want to use the Eee in full desktop mode, make sure you do two things; (1) change the boot mode so that the Eee goes straight into desktop mode (you change this under settings while in Easy mode), and (2) change your wireless network connection to start on boot up.

VLC
The only app that I added was VLC, the versatile media player. In particular, I wanted to play mp4 video files which the default media player can’t handle. Installing VLC is quite fiddly, but as long as you follow the instructions carefully, you should have no problems. Follow these instructions for installing VLC, and if it doesn’t install, then it’s likely that the address in the sources.list file in incorrect. I used ftp://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian and it installed fine.
The only other software that I installed were the Firefox extensions Scribefire (blogging) and del.icio.us (social bookmarking).

I think the Linux OS offers everything that I need (for the Eee). The full desktop mode is powerful, fast and stress free, and if I want to lend the Eee to someone else, I can jump back to Easy mode at any time. So the best OS for the Eee is … the one it comes with.