Alt-Click

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.