Homepages that work: Amazon.com
Posted in Design, User Experience
Amazon.com is America’s largest online retailer with over 50 million visitors a month. With so much traffic, how do they tailor to each user and convert them?
Goals: sell online & offline products, sell user’s content & items, sign up new users, extend website’s reach
Audience: consumers, sellers, writers, businesses, developers and advertisers
Clear, consistent navigation.
The header of the homepage features the logo that doubles as a home button, a left hand navigation bar, an expanding search bar, a shopping cart button and a login for returning users. All of the elements remain consistent throughout the rest of the site, even the left hand navigation bar which condenses into a drop down on subpages to allow for underlying content to fill the full width of the page.
User specific content.
It’s true, Amazon knows what you like. At the top of the homepage it prompts you to create an account to receive “personalized recommendations”. It remembers what items you have searched for before (even if you haven’t logged in) and displays relevant and even alternative items.
Lots of content, many ways to search.
Content is king, at least on this site it is. Just in case you didn’t know how to navigate the site, they have you covered. You can list out every category of products with one click, browse every category from the homepage and search in any category or sub-category of products. Pay attention to the drop down menu to the left of the ultra-wide search box, it lists all the product categories alphabetically whereas the menu bar to the left lists all the categories by popularity.
Expandable design.
I am usually not a fan of websites that expand to fill the width the browser, mostly because it looks bad and rarely serves purpose beyond filling the screen. However, in the case of Amazon, they do a pretty good job of implementing an expandable design. The center column houses several rows of products based on the users browsing history that display anywhere from 3 to 7 (or more) products depending on the width of their browser. The only thing that doesn’t expand is the top row that houses an advertisement (currently displaying the Kindle 2), it simply center aligns and leaves an awkward white space to the left and right of it.
Ads in a Box.
Let’s face it, the whole site is an advertisement, even the content is well… selling content. But what they have done, is place all of the “real ads” in boxes on the right hand side, this not only breaks up the site a little, but it lends creditability to the “content” in the middle which is more specific to the user.
Conclusion: Although Amazon’s homepage is not the most creative one ever, it is extremely relevant and engaging. It is also extremely easy to navigate and takes into consideration multiple different user browsing habits. All in all, Amazon does an exceptional job of engaging and converting their users, and their revenue is proof of that.