What I want to see is: ‘Books,’ ‘Music,’ ‘DVD’ and ‘Electronics’… plus a control that says ‘Configure Tabs.’ This feature has practically been built already in the form of ‘Edit Favorites,’ but it’s obscured by the overabundance of navigation saturating the Web site. I can’t imagine it would take much engineering to stitch it together with whatever mechanism is currently controlling the display of navigational tabs at the top, but I can imagine the company wants to reserve the right to constantly remind me that I can buy a garden hoe along with a copy of “Living History.”
I don’t complain about this simply because I’m looking for a better shopping experience, but because Amazon’s tabs are so influential to the general practice of Web design. Since the early days of e-commerce, the Amazon tab structure has been the gold standard in developing tabular navigation paradigms, functioning as a baseline model for probably thousands of Web sites. Of course, each derivation of the tabs tries to inject a little extra style or a unique twist in the paradigm, but in the end, they’re all still Amazon’s tabs at heart. Injecting a little user-friendly smarts into the tabs would go a long way towards propagating that practice across other Web sites.
+