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Chris Higgins
Zoomii: Another Way to Shop Amazon
by Chris Higgins - July 8, 2008 - 1:24 PM

Zoomii is an alternate approach to browsing Amazon, and it attempts to make the experience more like that of a bookstore — but a digital bookstore at that. Using a “bookshelf” metaphor, various top books are placed on shelves by categories and arranged spatially, so you can move around them with your mouse — click and drag to move to another section, use the scroll wheel to zoom in or out, and click on a book for details. It only has the top 25,000 Amazon titles at the moment, and you can only buy stuff in the US and Canada at the moment, but it’s a neat idea. My favorite demo: do a search for floss using the search box. Boom.

Have a look at their video demo:


And if you’re intrigued, browse Zoomii yourself.

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Comments (2)

  1. So, I love zoomable UIs. (They go way back, but never really caught on — the iphone and exposé might be slowly changing that.) And I love “where it is is what it is” UIs that associate information with “physics.” But I’m not a fan of slavish devotion to physical metaphors. I mean, imagine if the Finder were really like a filing cabinet! You could virtually flip through files looking for your virtual paper! It would be wonderfully… tedious.

    I haven’t played with zoomii enough to know if it’s on the good side or the bad side of the line for this kind of thing, but I wonder what the advantage of it is for an Amazon-like experience? Amazon already does a pretty good job with serendipity and showing related stuff. Is it browsing? Does it feel nice for browsing? I worry that they’re only in it for the eye candy.

    posted by Michael Higgins on 7-13-2008 at 10:32 am

  2. I think the Zoomii people are primarily in it for the eye candy, frankly. The one place I found it particularly useful was in search. On Amazon’s default search (which is good…), I usually expect to find my result in the first one or two items. If it isn’t there, things seem to get less relevant real fast. On Zoomii I found that relevant results seemed more clickable (presumably due to the big image thumbnail), and there was less cruft (I guess because it’s a subset of the total Amazon catalog). But anyway. Mostly eye candy.

    posted by Chris Higgins on 7-14-2008 at 10:14 pm

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