Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Uncluttr: A cleaner Amazon
Category: Prototype, Rails
, Showcase
Derek Gaw gave an ignite talk tonight onAIR which showed off his Uncluttr project.
Derek works for Amazon, but this is outside of his company work. He is frustrated seeing 1.5MB of content being downloaded when you login, find a book, and then view the detail page. That is too much.
Uncluttr uses the Amazon Web Services and is written with Prototype and Rails.
3.7 rating from 37 votes
Great idea, much easier than searching trough amazon
Very nice idea.
I get some JS error on IE7 (Vista).
I’m an amazon fan, but I share his frustration. This is a step in the right direction. I’m hoping Amazon latches on and redesigns it’s UI.
It’s a nice idea, but the Uncluttr design itself has awkward design and proportions. Those book thumbnails, for example, are either too big or too tightly arranged. The Uncluttr logo is too big and practically colliding with the upper menu. Etc.
Something fishy about this in Safari, the thumbs are all over the place.
Same idea as http://www.cooqy.com for eBay…provide an alternative Web 2.0 UI that is smaller and performs better, along with shopping enhancements.
Search results are fishy. If you do a search on “blender book” on Amazon and Uncluttr, you get different results, with the Carsten Wartmann book not appearing in Uncluttr. The Uncluttr UI indicates five pages of search results on that search although only one book is actually visible.
On a separate issue, the “You may like” recommendations are not clickable, which breaks the flow of discovery.
All that being said, this is a fantastic idea, and I hope it gets traction.
Searching for “vernor vinge” brings me up 5 items per page and takes forever to page through. The same search on Amazon brings up less pretty results, but loads far faster – and gives more results per page.
I’m not seeing the benefit, here.
As far as a simple way to shop amazon, I recommend http://www.jangle.net
It’s clean, easy to use and saves time!
Another interesting UI for AmazonOrderItOnTheWeb.com. Clean look and feel plus useful new features that Amazon doesn’t yet carry.