Welcome to Ajax Intervention, in which we dissect how major websites misuse, or fail to use, Ajax to improve their user experience.
Up this time: Amazon.com and its inconsistent new Ajax redesign.
The beta test for Amazon’s new DHTML navigation has garnered plenty of perceptive commentary from the Ajax and UxD communities. (See posts from Ajaxian, Functioning Form, Jeffrey McManus and CommaDot.) Yet one puzzling bit of Ajax fuctionality hasn’t gotten much notice: The inconsistent use of tooltips in item listings.
I’ve long bemoaned the fact that Amazon doesn’t let me add an item to my cart, or to my wish list, from its search results and landing pages. To buy an item, I’ve always had to navigate to the item’s individual product-details page. But that’s all changed with the new redesign – sort of.
When I visit the new Amazon homepage, I see a module titled "What Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?" It contains thumbnails and headlines for three different products related to my most recent search. Next to the name of each product, I see a little blue caret graphic. Mousing over it, I’m presented with an extremely useful microcontent popup with some basic product details and two buttons: "Add to Cart" and "Add to Wish List." I’ve longed for just such a feature for years. It’s as if Amazon has finally read my mind.
But … wait a minute. Directly above and below the "What Do Customers Buy …" module, I see two similar modules: "New For You" and "More to Explore." The former contains product suggestions; the latter, products I’ve previously viewed, or items similar to them. But both sets of listings lack the little blue caret graphic for which I’ve now been trained to look. I try to mouse over various portions of each listing, but no tooltip appears. For these products, I guess I still need to navigate to a details page to purchase them.
How about the search results page? A quick search for "Cory Doctorow," my new favorite sci-fi writer, returns three pages of results. The very first item is the one I’m looking for: the short-story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present." Once again, Amazon is reading my mind. But try as I might, I can’t find a tooltip or an "Add to Cart" button. Once again, I’m forced to load an entire new page – with several scrolls worth of extraneous data – just to purchase something I’ve already decided I want. This isn’t so bad when I visit the site to search for a single item. But how about those times when I come with a list of 10 new tech manuals to purchase? The number of pages I need to load is twice what it should be. God forbid I don’t have broadband.
I understand why this sort of thing happens on big sites. Amazon runs tons of betas, often simultaneously, to gauge the effectiveness of individual UI tweaks based on rigorous metrics. Interface refinement is about testing new ideas without re-architecting your entire site or totally confusing your existing user base. I have no doubt that the search-results page and the three upsell modules I’m testing are all maintained separately, perhaps by separate teams. If the Ajax functionality in one of them proves successful, it will eventually make its way to the others.
Still, in the meantime, users are left with a UI whose inconsistency casts doubts about the validity of any data it generates. How can a new feature win over your users if it’s applied arbitrarily?
Ironically though, unliike most of Amazon’s little DHTML/Ajax tweaks, I think this one is executed almost flawlessly. You can barely see it on a fast connection, but there’s a nice little animated "loading" bar graph to provide status on your XHR. The telescope effect on the tooltip itself is subtle but nice. I might quibble about the rendering logic, which allows the tooltip to scroll off the page rather than shifting it fully within the viewport. Still, I know how difficult that logic can be to pull off on a templatized, highly dynamic site. Overall, this is an extremely well though-out feature that should make it faster and easier for customers to drop some cash. Let’s hope it makes it onto the entire site.
[...] at Amazon: The online retailer adopted DHTML navigation just last year – at least 5 years after most other big sites – because its tab interface had grown [...]