A9 Interaction Design

Amazon's new A9 search interface and toolbar is quite interesting, both in functionality and design. I have yet to find the a serious itch for the book search but A9 might make that more probable.

Good points:

• Design! Not sure I like it a lot, but I certainly appreciate that it's there.
• DHTML! Woot. 
  
• The sidebars, book search and search history, are well crafted with the subtle use of underlining to reinforce the affordance crafted by the tabish nature of the labels. They open up with no page reload -- appearing to do a dynamic load of the data. Once again, bravo!
• Each result has a site info popup with Alexa ratings, answering the #1 question about a link: is it likely to work?
  
• (Some QA folks have certainly had a handful with this one)

Rough Points:

• Color. Bad Color? I certainly hope somebody did some contrast analysis on this stuff.
• Search paging: That font size is one of the smallest on the page and there's minimal visual callout to the next button.  Bad design for the motor and visual system. And the arrows aren't hyperlinked!
  
• Rotated text.  We know that rotated text performs poorly.
• The alternate search tabs are only available at the top of the page but a key use case is inspect the results of the web search and then decide to go for books or an earlier search.  I'd put the tab buttons at the bottom of the column as well and scroll the user to the top if they open from there.
  

Personal pref?  I'd rather see a X icon for closing the panels than the [close] text.  In the first hour at least, the brackets are not distinctive enough for non-foveal vision -- I have to search for them.

Must *fight* *urge* to build Mozilla version of A9...
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Posted at 23:33, Published in: UI Hypertext