Auction Sidebar April 4, 1999 Last week Amazon tried to drive more traffic to their new auction subsite by placing three links to items up for bid right in the middle of space usually reserved for information relevant to the product being viewed. The change in the layout was spotted by Jakob Nielsen on March 31 in a spotlight on Useit.Com where he saw the change as "polluting the user experience." While I was browsing Amazon this morning I noticed the links to Amazon's new auction subsite were moved into the sidebar.

Comments from Jakob Nielsen Jakob Nielsen's comments when asked about the modified layout at Amazon: "The new placement is a definite improvement and much less intrusive on the user experience. Placing announcements of "other stuff" (whatever it may be) off to the side at the bottom of a column of navigation links means that the book-buying user is free to concentrate on the meat of the page with an uninterrupted flow of content about the user's current topic of interest." And some thoughts on the trade off of even including the auction links in the layout: "There is a general usability principle saying that "less is more", so it is always best to completely avoid any extraneous page elements, but the new placement is not likely to cause any significant reduction of usability because it is in a space that is ignored by users until they have finished their primary task." Updated April 5, 1999: A Wired News story about the auction links on Amazon details the changes I saw yesterday. The spokesperson also said more changes were planned: "Amazon spokesperson Paul Capelli said the company hopes to engineer changes soon to make the auction items more relevant to the book listings they appear with."

Related links [1] User Experience: Going once, twice, sold!; Today's Links Story [2] Amazon's Auction a Bust So Far; Wired News [3] Ask and ye shall receive; Seattle Weekly