Today Amazon has launched a new storefront called WindowShop, which presents some of the store’s newest and most popular movies, books, and video games in a way that makes browsing the online megastore actually fun. Each product is displayed as a tile on a large grid, which users can pan across until they find something they’re interested in.
The site seems geared towards shoppers who are just looking for ideas, as there isn’t a search feature. Users can scroll through the site using their arrow keys, zooming in on individual products by hitting the spacebar. Each product includes a demo video (in the case of movies, songs, and video games) or an excerpt (from books).
The site seems to be an answer to more attractive online interfaces like iTunes, which encourage users to simply browse even when they don’t have something in mind. Amazon may sell just about everything under the sun, but the store’s massive inventory is also detriment as it can be overwhelming - unlike iTunes, I’ve never visited the store just to “look around”.
WindowShop is fun to play with, but the site should include some kind of navigation (for example, I should be able to look at just books). I realize that part of the fun comes from stumbling across random products, but at this point the site is more of a novelty than something I’d visit regularly.
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That just makes me nauseous watching it.
Lol, I was initially excited when I came across this blog posting… but after reading all the comments here, my enthusiasm to try out Windowshop has somewhat dampened…
One can already do window shopping on amazon stuff using cooliris
they are probably just leveraging cooliris technology to do this, so now anyone can use it on amazon without installing the plug in.
seems cool but probably has limited influence on my buying habits. i’m not a casual amazon shopper and only go to the site when i know specifically what i want to buy. i’m sure lots of other people behave differently though.
Right with you. And, I wish their emails would stop, I don’t need to buy a router everyday.
Is it just me or does this look like a 10′ TV interface to you? Would be great on Tivo / Apple TV.
It seems like a good start.. but wouldn’t it be great if sites like Amazon really thought about the shopping experience more and made shopping online actually fun - like it is in real life!
Great concept, I started to get lost while looking around. I think they need more though…its not there yet.
“WindowShop is fun to play with, but the site should include some kind of navigation (for example, I should be able to look at just books).”
The categories are noted at the top. Scroll left/right to change categories, up/down to stick to just one.
this is really cool, needs a bit of refinement but a good start.
“the site should include some kind of navigation (for example, I should be able to look at just books).”
Categories have their own columns and the first page says “Arrow Keys to Navigate”.
Didn’t Cooliris do this before?
They copied the Magic Shelf from the Borders site. Given that the Magic Shelf is so successful, Amazon decided to try something similar to see market response
I really like the new store. I guess there’s lots of competition now with itunes and the like out there. Go Amazon go!
This seems to duplicate the functionality already provided by zoomii.com, except maybe not as good.
Zoomii is Great. Super fast and all in javascript, no Flash required. Zoomii’s speed makes Google Maps feel like it crawls.
I’ll second that. Zoomii is a far superior user experience. Zoomii gives a great overview of a large book selection with the option of zooming in for greater detail. Windowshop feels claustrophobic in comparison.
I was able to browse through for a minute but then I got a fatal warning saying shockwave has performed an illegal operation. Not good.
Amazon was never good at marrying information architecture with UX design beyond the page level and into web clusters or web apps. It’s all way too crowded.
I’ve been waiting for an optional drag and drop flash eCommerce solution from them since… 2001?
Some anecdotes from my user experience:
The top navigation bar that allows you to navigation left to right between different content and dates is yet to be perfect
* Different content is presented in a different color - this is a good cognitive indication, my only concern is that there just too many colors to grasp the difference or even notice it (for example between movies and TV shows).
* There is lack of consistency - some categories are monthly and some weekly. This situation create a bit of confusing, as the order of categories is not consistent, and a bit confusing.
* I would add some sort of borders between update dates, for example an intuitive way to understand that now i switched between October updates to August updates and so on… this will ad another level of structure.
This experience of easy browsing without using the mouse is good, but there is one little annoying bug here… if you give me the chance not to use the mouse why do you make me press on the “I” (help) icon to read the help? pressing the letter “I” should do the trick.
The default way of navigation (zoomed in) in my mind is not the right way, because for someone who didn’t see the feature before, found it difficult to get a good orientation, and it might create a negative first impression for the users.
I think another level of information is missing - short reviews, rating or a reference to information on the site. In my mind i see an option to flip the item picture to see its back side, and in it will appear some additional information on the item.
I find the window shop pretty good compared to many semi-virtual environments I saw in the past. But keep in mind, this can not replace the rest of the shop/site (in this case amazon shop). It is not for no reason that the feature name is “Window shop”, as this can be used effectively almost only to present new items in a sort of a “show case”.
I don’t know if this is powered by Cooliris, but the Cooliris plug-in for window shopping on Amazon is much nicer. Prettier, smoother, less jerky.
i think the stores available at http://enjoy3d.com are true 3D stores compare to WindowShop