Well, they are at it again. This is a neat little tool– let’s you flip back a couple products seamlessly. So I play with it, and many questions leap to mind.
Is this the right location? I found it, so maybe… but it is in a location that is about leavin your current task, shopping, and doing a differt sort of task– going more global– to checking an order, or checking out… why don’t more people do task analysis on the interface? it works wonderfully for understanding what folks are paying attention to when. The location also requires the product images to be so small as to to be utterly unrecognizable.
This flavor of dropdown is surprising. At least they don’t make it look like a traditional dropdown. Still, it’s odd to see a list of items ended with a little “see also” unit.
The question is my usual one– when a designer wildly flouts conventions, then what? I can’t condemn it out of hand because I haven’t seen it in the usability lab. Conventions are fine, but one never knows when breaking the rules will allow one to leap past the competition. Could this be such a leap?
And yet my experience watching hundreds of users interact with websites makes me guess that it won’t work very well. On the other hand, Amazon is known to test everything– though I’ve heard its A/B testing. They put out a design to a percentage of their users. And they watch clicks. Is it getting clicks?
But what do those clicks tell Amazon? That users like/understand/value the property? Or that the colors drew their eyes however breifly?
Quantititative for what, qualitative for why.. you don’t want half the story…
I’ll be interested in what this new widget does in the next few weeks. Will it change, grow, or disappear like amazon’s earlier stacked tabs?
It doesn’t take usability testing to tell me this is bad. Having looked at products, I go to “my account. And look what happens to my history.