Amazon may be a bargain hunter’s dream website when it comes to getting certain products from the US, but the site is fugly. It’s also not very user friendly, especially for international shoppers. That’s why Maurice from Queensland web design firm Kintek decided to propose a redesign for the Amazon site. And the results are infinitely better.
Maurice’s explanation of why he redesigned the site is a long and interesting read, but he sums up his approach rather nicely:
I wanted to move away from the liquid layout… at first I was going to do a 1200px max-width fluid layout, but then decided to take it to the next level and work on a 960px fixed width column workspace to show how the content area could be used. After all, there’s a whole new host of 960 sized displays on the market in the form of tablets and high resolution smart phones like the iphone 4. The main problem I ran into with this was the left hand menu. You’ll notice on product pages of Amazon.com the left hand menu is displayed when you hover over “Shop All Departments”. I personally am not a fan of structure changes between different areas of a website. The more seamless you make the experience, the easier you’ll make your website to navigate (to an extent). I decided to keep the functionality more or less the same as the current website.
The end result turned this:
To this:
Of course, the complaints and subsequent work of a web designer in Queensland isn’t going to rattle the cage of a global company like Amazon. But we can dream that maybe someone from the US giant will see this and take the ideas on board.