Amazon Reveals a New Website Design

I was somewhat surprised this morning when I clicked through an Amazon email to see their new website design.

Amazon Reveals a New Website Design

I do a lot with Amazon. From shopping to looking for new income streams, Amazon provides a lot of services for me.

Because I spend so much time on the site, their algorithms flag me as a potential buyer for a lot of different products, and they send me emails hoping I’ll buy some more stuff. Sometimes I ignore them; sometimes I follow them back to the source.

This morning I clicked through to Amazon to see if I could advertise this Amazon app for them and was greeted with this:

That’s what I saw in my Chrome browser. I was expecting to be greeted with their normal design, which was still displayed this morning when I navigated there in Safari:

As you can see in the above screenshots, the new design is mostly the replacement of the bloated and crowded header with a sleeker, more minimalist header. The colors have been replaced with a gray-scale design. There has been some movement of the primary navigation menu options, but the secondary navigation menu remains largely unchanged.

Another notable difference is the home page. If you are able to view the new design in your browser, you will notice the fixed navigation menu on the left has been replaced with a drop down menu, allowing more space on the front page for Amazon to feature their products and leave some aesthetic white space as well.

Update: The new Amazon design is in testing and has not been officially released yet. News sources on the web theorize that this new design is designed for a tablet to be released by Amazon in the near future. The new design is no longer visible to me on my MacBook Pro, regardless of what browser I am using.