I once had a chance talked to the interaction team lead in Amazon.com, we talked about redesign of Amazon.com homepage, I think it's a good example of interaction design, so here I'm going to share with you the redesign story.

How I encounter the chance of Redesign
I was reading this book Don't Make Me Think, it's a very good book about user experience design for websites. I found the author of the book, use Amazon.com as examples in many cases, such as bread crumb design, category tags, and etc;



So I became curious about the interaction design on Amazon.com. Coincidentally, Amazon was looking for an user experience expert, I got a phone call from the recruiter from Amazon, then we talked about redesign of Amazon.com homepage.


Amazon.com Homgpage
Amazon.com is actually a clean website, regarding the vast amount of content. I have to say the interaction team did a pretty good job, if you can remember those past versions of it's home page.


If you are a interaction designer/ information architect with many years experience, I bet you can understand how painful it is handling lots of ads banner on a page. What makes it even worse is, when you have to deal with lots of images and text, and you want to differentiate these contents from ad banners, it gets more complicated. Why it's so complicated? Because the ad banners client sometimes doesn't want those ads looks obviously like ad banners, otherwise users might just ignore them and never click on them.

You can see that Amazon.com nowadays use a smart way to differentiate ads and non-ads content: background color. Most of the non-ads content, such as product categories, search column, user account & suggestions, are filled with background color;s and vice versa, most of the ads are plain white background. Usually on a white background webpage, users tend to seek for colorful contents, so this strategy Amazon use is pretty good, user can easily find the most important contents on the homepage.

Redesign Idea
However, it doesn't mean that the home page of Amazon.com is so perfect that nothing can be improved at all. Information architecture wise, the homepage of Amazon.com is well-organized; but it could be better if the designer takes user's individual difference into concern. For example, a 32-year-old sales manager might not be very interested in "New and Used Textbook", while a 15-year-old kid is not so interested in "Shavers from BRAUN".

How can we improve that part? Can we create a customized homepage for different user groups?
... to be continued