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A9

April 19, 2004 | View Comments (15) | Category: Design Critiques

Summary: My likes and dislikes to the new A9 brought to us by Amazon.

Last week, Forever Geek broke the news (after Battelle and the other 20 news sources of course) about Amazon's new search engine A9. I am fascinated by the possibilities of this new search engine and will touch up on those in an article on Forever Geek down the road. However, since I was in the middle of this redesign my mind was focused on what I liked and disliked about the design.

Disclaimer: I have not asked permission from A9 to talk about their website. This is just my opinion on the site. Nothing more, nothing less.

Fonts

I enjoy small fonts. However, I enjoy them in short blocks of text. I am not sure if I like small text on a site that is so bare. Since all the text is the same, with the exclusion of the nav at the upper-right, none of it jumps out at me. It is possible that they just want my focus to be on the search box, but eventually someone is going to try and read the text. 12px font should work here without compromising the design I think.

I would be very curious to see why they went with that size. Scratch that. Glancing at their CSS they probably just got tired of updating everything :-P

Colors

Initially, I questioned why they did not go with a white background. I read somewhere recently (in an article that I will describe during the process) that white is one of the power colors that should be used (obviously not all the time) for backgrounds. So I figured it would have been A9's best bet to go with white.

Then I figured that not everyone enjoys have a huge white background on their monitor. For some it is like trying to read words on a flashlight, so I figured maybe A9 was using this for their consideration.

The colors I am still up and down about, which could be a bad thing. It could be a bad thing being indifferent because it makes it more difficult for me to establish any brand awareness with them. Initially, Google had the ugliest logo (in my opinion) in the world with those colors, but now I can see how strong emotions help to develop attachments with brands. Google became those colors. With A9, the colors do not bring about any strong emotion and so when I think of A9, I can't think of anything.

The Long and Short of it

On a 1600x1200 resolution the search box is huge. I read in Christina Wodtke's book, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, that she liked to use small textareas to illicit short responses and larger textareas when she wanted more. A9 gives me the initial feeling that I would never be able to generate a search that will fulfill their needs.

This could be a major plus though, because good search results usually depend on excellent search queries. The more specific you can be the better, so long search boxes are not necessarily a bad thing.

Search Page Usability

Since I already touched upon font sizes I won't describe my distaste for having to read long lines of text at very small sizes (long meaning 550px or more).

A9 allows one to do a search result and get a listing of books that contain the search. This is the equivalent of Google's News and Images sections. The initial page that comes up after a search has a heading like this:

The close link does absolutely nothing at this stage until you open up the other panes. Nielsen doesn’t think you should have navigation items clickable if you are already on that page. I don’t like having navigation elements, that are verbs, letting me click without the action that the verb is describing happening. If a homepage link brings me back to the homepage then fine. If a link says "close" and it doesn’t close I can see myself getting frustrated.

Same domain, Same style

Something that Google does really well with its search results is let you know when a page is on the same domain as another search result. Since A9 uses Google I figured they would follow suit. However, doing a search for “whitespace” gave results of me being at the #5 and #6 position. Looks like they are two different sites just by a quick scan of the results page.

Feedback Page

Since I am going to send this entry to them as feedback I had to visit their feedback page or the “liquid design gone wrong” page. Liquid design is cool. If you like its benefits over fixed width then use it. However, I fail to see the use of it on form elements, especially ones with a fixed size. The first two dropdown boxes extend the width of my screen yet at most should only be 25px wide. I can’t think of any good reasons for this.

Even though the comments box matches up with some of what I said earlier concerning the search box, I don't like it being that length. Reading your own long paragraphs at that width and that size font just won’t happen for me. I would cut the width down (gotta make it fixed) and increase the height. Since you are looking for feedback you want a textarea that gives the impression of lots of information, but in concise sentences.

The Code

First I know they are trying to reach the largest possible audience with regards to browsers and therefore the use of tables is expected. However, the lack of even trying to follow XHTML specs is not. Just to make it quick because looking at the XHTML and CSS code will reveal too many problems to discuss here, they use the <html> and <body> tags at the beginning of the document, but fail to close them at the end!

Design at the beginning

Over the past couple of weeks many discussions have been going with regards to including design at the beginning of the development process. When you do this I also think you are including usability as well. In this case I think A9 focused solely on the backend technology with no regards as to what the customers will see. The site is still labeled as Beta so I can only hope that some improvements are made as this could be a valuable service.

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