Amazon's Windowshop.com is a new site introduced late last week which allows you to virtually browse through the best-selling Amazon.com products in various categories. You can scroll through the content and zoom in and out on product previews in a style that very much reminds of how the Cooliris browser plugin works. With Windowshop.com, you can virtually "window shop" the latest and greatest in Amazon.com books, music, videos, and games.
On Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it's a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you'll see a video clip displayed instead.
The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor's Picks and "Best-Selling of All Time" categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.
The Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a "powered by Cooliris" logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn't, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual "windowshopping" itself.
It's interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.
Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to Cooliris's technology. You know what they say about imitation...
We've seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream's visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off?
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That is nice, I really like that a lot. Thanks for the heads up! Something to play around with today.
Posted by: dan
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October 27, 2008 6:59 AM
This is an interesting concept, especially considering that people generally do not aimlessly browse online stores. The cooliris interface is perfect for window shopping, but I really wonder if people will elect to go to a specific URL to window shop...
...after all window-shopping often just happens as we pass by a store on our way to somewhere else.
Posted by: Q dub
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October 27, 2008 7:15 AM
This looks really cool, however the buy link doesn't appear for me - so there is no actual link to Amazon at all!
Posted by: Richard Cunningham | October 27, 2008 7:24 AM
I played with it and found it really addicting; although I can see a lot of issues for people with slower internet connectivity.
Posted by: JungleG
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October 27, 2008 10:25 AM
This is nowhere near as awesome as http://zoomii.com/ which doesn't use flash and is more like a Google Maps experience.
Posted by: Richard Cole | October 27, 2008 11:16 AM
help a girl out, I never get dugg anymore ;P
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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October 27, 2008 2:09 PM
Does anyone know what kind of technologies Cooliris use?
Thanks!
Posted by: Cheng Chen | October 27, 2008 8:38 PM
Some anecdotes from my user experience review on my blog:
http://www.logblo.com/2008/10/28/AmazonWindowShopCanIReallyShopLikeThis.aspx
The top navigation bar that allows you to navigation left to right between different content and dates is yet to be perfect
Different content is presented in a different color - this is a good cognitive indication, my only concern is that there just too many colors to grasp the difference or even notice it (for example between movies and TV shows).
There is lack of consistency - some categories are monthly and some weekly. This situation create a bit of confusing, as the order of categories is not consistent, and a bit confusing.
I would add some sort of borders between update dates, for example an intuitive way to understand that now i switched between October updates to August updates and so on… this will ad another level of structure.
This experience of easy browsing without using the mouse is good, but there is one little annoying bug here… if you give me the chance not to use the mouse why do you make me press on the “I” (help) icon to read the help? pressing the letter “I” should do the trick.
The default way of navigation (zoomed in) in my mind is not the right way, because for someone who didn’t see the feature before, found it difficult to get a good orientation, and it might create a negative first impression for the users.
I think another level of information is missing - short reviews, rating or a reference to information on the site. In my mind i see an option to flip the item picture to see its back side, and in it will appear some additional information on the item.
I find the window shop pretty good compared to many semi-virtual environments I saw in the past. But keep in mind, this can not replace the rest of the shop/site (in this case amazon shop). It is not for no reason that the feature name is “Window shop”, as this can be used effectively almost only to present new items in a sort of a “show case”.
Posted by: Dan | October 28, 2008 9:21 AM
Amazon WindowsShop is nice, but if you'd like a much more true 3D shopping experience, I'd check out the stores at http://enjoy3d.com
Posted by: Scott | October 28, 2008 9:33 PM