Is Amazon About to Change UIs?
The last few days I found that Amazon has been serving me a different UI than on other computers. Click on the screenshots for a larger view.
Old UI:
New UI:
There’s a clear shift here away from category-based navigation and towards search as the primary tool to find products. It would be more interesting if Amazon began serving up different UIs based on user profiles, but more than likely they’re testing this particular UI out before a full release. They must have a ton of data on user behavior from all of their UI iterations, but I doubt they would pursue such a shift due to the added cost of maintaining multiple UIs.
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I think if you disable Cookies for Amazon or in general you should easily find out, whether you recieve a profile-based UI.
Mine looks like a mixture of the two screenshots you provided. Amazon.de looks as it always has been.
To clarify a little more, obviously the products recommended are based on a profile. It’s the movement of search to the top and the removal of individual tabs for product categories that caught my interest. I believe this is a pretty serious shift as well as a very intelligent one.
I’ve been getting the new UI as well…along with a helping of REALLY slow page loads.
I never saw the new layout.. Amazon decided to stay with the Tabs From Hell theme, I guess.