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Alibaba’s turns to user-centered design to improve products and services

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Posted by Aliuser on Mar 26, 2009 in B2B marketplace

Alibaba (HKSE1688) International site cooks up a recipe in what is dubbed as a major user interface clean-up by revamping its navigation design. In other words, buyers and suppliers will have a more pleasant user experiences than before to find their ways to My Alibaba Message Center, to search products, services and to access different channels e.g. buy channel, sell channel and community channel etc.

Web navigation, navigation behavior and other building blocks are factored into the newly-released navigation system in an effort to creat a palette of effective navigation mechanisms.

Alibaba focuses more on -navigation-usability

Over time, Alibaba’s navigation appears to be an acute problem for many users to finish their tasks. The China Internet company cleans up items which are under utilized in the utilities bar, persistence navigation scheme and its search bar as to enhance navigation usability.

A simplier and compact persistence navigation is considered an unexpendable internal drive ( 內功) for site stickiness, usability and findability; while SEO initiative is the external powerful tool (外功) to draw users from all over the world, bringing traffic to the site.

It’s delightful to see a light-weight search bar is applied in its secondary level, a move to avoid distracting users from focusing on their primary task while keeping the search bar prominent enough to conduct another round of search.

User can compare the differences by browsing the following new and old versions and see it yourself if the new design has improved its ease-of-use, playing the same tune with Jack Ma’s customer-first slogan.

: Alibaba newly-launched navigationa nd search bar design

: Alibaba’s previous navigation and search bar design

: Alibaba focuses more on -navigation-usability

Aliuser is hoping that a similar approach will be taken place in other areas such as, the SERP and its product detail page. Another modification we would suggest to make is its refined search, a hot item that users find it useful but not very much usable. Yet we have seen improvement lately in this aspect.

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