Amazon.com redesigned

Popped over to Amazon.com tonight, (looking to see how much the 3rd season of "24" on DVD is running) and to my surprise I saw something different. Seeing anything different in Amazon's design is interesting to say the least.

A change in navigation, a change in color(no more brown) to a blue fading bar with a hint of an Aqua styling on the buttons. The tab system has been simplifed into 3 and potentially 4 buttons; the "amazon" button, the "your store" button, the new "See All Categories" button and potentially a 4th button with the category that is currently being displayed.

The most interesting aspect of the change is the "See All Categories" button which activates a javascript driven pop-down menu of the main areas of the amazon.com website. This is what surprised me most. Can't say that I was expecting to see any dynamic interface elements on Amazon. The search box, which was in the left hand column, has been moved to the main top navigation bar as has the A9 search feature. Another interesting change.

I would imagine that some large scale usability studies were done to support these changes. Several weeks ago I was delivered a redesigned product page at Amazon which I suspect was a simple A/B analysis that was being performed on live customers. I don't expect these changes will be disappearing any time soon.