Amazon.com’s website launched on July 16 1996 (Spector, 2000, pp.70). and it started with the mission – “to use the internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible.� (Baxley, 2003, pp.381). Today, Amazon.com can stand not only as an undisputed leader of online shopping, but also as the pioneer of the Web, because of its successful and well-defined website.
Amazon.com sets the standards, which others follow (Baxley, 2003, pp.382) because it is an outstanding electronic communication resource. As with all web applications, the success of Amazon.com's site is based on two strong models: the conceptual and structural model. The conceptual model is based on the concept of a reference catalogue, which helps Amazon.com to uniform product categories. This magazine-styled catalogues was also designed to browse and explore reference cataloguess and product specific searches. (Baxley, 2003, pp. 382-389). This model of reference catalogue not only gives users clear understanding of what the site offers and how it is organised, but also provides a solid foundation on which the interface can grow and develop (Baxley, 2003, pp. 382-389). Another model is the structural model. Because of the huge content in its web page, the structural model looks like a hub. The center of the hub contains the product details and category index pages and the spokes link to functional areas, such as checkout and account management. Amazon also uses the structural model as a guide for its checkout process and another hub for its account management area (Baxley, 2003, pp. 382-389). Due to this model, Amazon.com is able to plan effective ratios of breadth and depth in website hierarchies and also provides clear, brief and highly conspicuous information (Farkas & Farkas, 2000, pp.341-358).
Despite using these foundation models, Amazon.com follows some effective guidelines for its web navigation, such as providing orientation information on lower-level pages to support continued exploration of the website, providing a search facility or an index for direct access to content and providing a link to the homepage throughout the site (Farkas & Farkas, 2000, pp. 341-358).
Amazon.com features an unusually rich amount of online help and this help system is procedural in nature and follows a FAQ style (Baxley, 2003, pp. 397-405). So, users have a quick way to search across all help pages. Meanwhile, another helpful feature of the website is the topic summary on the category index page. This summary can be useful in answering users’ questions without requiring them to proceed to the next level. The layout of Amazon’s various pages present a clear visual hierarchy by placing critical elements at the top of the page and using horizontal rules and colour to identify different sections and groups (Baxley, 2003, pp. 397-405). Although Amazon.com’s current design strikes an acceptable balance between functionality and clutter, sometimes each element it adds pushes things toward the messy end of scale (Baxley, 2003, pp. 397-405). In addition, Amazon.com boasts one of the best order fuifillment of any online vendors (Baxley, 2003, pp. 397-405) because it has an effective One-Click Ordering system and allow consumers to make purchase without the need of going through the troblesome checkout process.
On the other hand, Amazon.com assigns a unique identifier to all items it sells, the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). For books, the ASIN is the same as the item's ISBN. Amazon.com offers access to its catalogue via web services, much as Google does to its search engine. "Search Inside the Book" is a feature, which can be found in its interface. It helps users to search for keywords in the full text of more than 120,000 books (Wikipedia, 2004).
Due to these effective primary elements on its web applications, Amazon.com creates the most influential and the largest interface, which helps to run its business strategies and processes successfully.
1. Baxley, B. (2003) Making The Web Work, USA: New Riders, ISBN 0735711968
2. Spector, R. (2000) Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, New York: Harper Collins, ISBN 073226796X
3. Farkas, D., & Farkas, J. (2000) “Guidelines for designing web navigation� Technical Communication, 47(3). pp. 341-358
Jason Er 10:01, 9 Sep 2004 (EST)
