October 31, 2008 10:30 AM
Window Shopping Goes Online
I'm a sucker for cool new online interfaces, especially those that find a way to bring traditional paradigms into the networked environment. To that end, let me point you to one of Amazon.com's latest projects: Amazon Windowshop Beta.
Here what you'll find is a dynamic way to peruse through books, audiobooks, music, videogames, and movies. Simply use your up-down-left-right arrows to scroll through and any time you pause on something that looks of interest the site will automatically start feeding you more info, like playing a movie trailer or audio of someone reading a book.
There are many things I love about this:
- It's slick. Super easy navigation, smooth animation when stuff moves around, reasonably intuitive structuring of where things are; it just works.
- It demands bandwidth. Lots of video is thrown around as you can easily watch a dozen trailers within minutes, though this also seems to rely on processor speed as much as connectivity, so it can get a little sluggish if your computer's slow.
- It lets you buy right away. Not surprising it enables this, but what's neat is that most of these products have a digital online version so you can go from perusing to purchasing immediately.
- It's arguably better than regular window shopping. This is what really gets me going. I actually think I like window shopping through this site better in real life. For movies when you're in a store all you have to go on is what the box looks like. The same often holds true for music, though many stores nowadays have listening stations. It's also arguable whether or not this is better for games as it's commonplace to have stations set up where you can play the game first, and that doesn't exist on this site yet.
But even still, I found myself really enjoying Amazon's attempt to reinvent window shopping. While for now it may be more gimmick than game changer, it helps point to a future where online experiences become more graphical, more interactive, more robust, and more capable of improving upon paradigms we're already familiar with.
So good work, Amazon. Keep it up!
