I must have landed in a test group today because I’ve got a brand new Amazon. I visited their home page today to discover this:

 

What!?…no left nav and the header is all…light. It’s a lot cleaner than their current, button-laden circus.

 

The persistent browse links are gone, replaced with a dropdown.

 

The sign-in area is also packed into a dropdown.

 

The cart dropdown is nice. I like the big, clean icon showing the number of items. Also notice the different sections on the homepage (Where it says “Airport Mania 2″). That’s a very well-presented display of highlights from their growing collection of properties.

 

The search bar shows me the highlights from their various deal categories before I even start typing. This is pretty smart placement because that’s probably the number-one clicked place on their homepage. Also notice the “Search In” dropdown is neatly tucked in the corner of the search box.

 

Here’s what that “search within” section looks like when expanded. Notice that on a search-results page the left sidebar is back. This indicates that this redesign is limited to the header and home page. At least for now…

 

As far as I can tell, the rest of the content on a product page hasn’t changed at all.

 

Finally, the cart dropdown with an item in it.

 

As far as I’m concerned, this is a pretty brilliant UI. There is a lot of information here. Amazon has a lot of stuff to communicate and they’ve packed it into intelligent chunks that are intuitive and well-presented. Their search bar has even more focus (sorry browse-lovers) and some nice added functionality. The cart dropdown is probably my favorite part just because I like the giant, minimalist icon and pretty dropdown. Their use of light colors with drop shadows everywhere is subtle but makes the dropdowns pop so they are easy to focus on. I wonder if they’ll roll this soon?