Digital Design Blog

A Double Shot of Amazon.com

Shot #1: Amazon.com Redesign

One of the biggest surprises this past week was the redesign of Amazon.com — a pretty bold leap forward for the online retailer even though the graphic language has a bit too much 2.0-ness for my taste.

While I haven’t had time to fully digest it all, it’s clearly an evolutionary improvement. Here’s why:

• left-hand navigation with a crisp taxonomy that nicely encompasses the site’s 40-odd departments
• task-based horizontal navigation (Cart, Wish Lists, etc.) that now houses search
• elegant use of AJAX on roll-over
• bold Web 2.0 inspired palette
  

Shot #2: Jeff Bezos and HBR

The second nice surprise is a great piece on Jeff Bezos in this month’s Havard Business Review. While there’s a certain puff-piece element to the interview, Bezos’ detailed description on how Amazon.com pursues a customer-centric strategy is a worthwhile read. Representative quote:

“I think somehow I am congenitally customer focused. And I think that from that comes this passion to figure out customer-focused strategies as opposed to, say, competitor-focused strategies…I do think they (customer-focused strategies) work better in fast-changing environments for two reasons. First, as I said before, customer needs change more slowly — assuming you pick the right ones — than a lot of other things. Second, close following (competitors) doesn’t work as well in a fast changing environment.”

Details on some Amazon.com successes and failures, plus the company’s ongoing investment in a “Web Lab” to track consumer behavior data and refine the Amazon.com UI is well worth noting.